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Dachau
Opened in Germany in March, 1933. It was one of the first Nazi concentration camps established. At first it was intended to house only political opponents of the Nazis such as Communists, Social Democrats, and others who had been condemned in a court of law. Gradually, a more diverse group was imprisoned, including Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, dissenting clergy, homosexuals, and others who denounced the Nazis.
Buchenwald
Buchenwald was one of the largest camps in Germany. It was situated on the northern slope of Ettersberg, a mountain five miles north of Weimar, in Thuringen. The camp was established on July 16, 1937, when the first group of prisoners, consisting of one hundred and fort-nine persons, mostly political detainees and criminals, were brought to the site. The name "Buchenwald" was given to it by Heinrich Himmler on July 28, 1937.
SS commander Standartenfuhrer Karl Koch (1937 - 1941) and SS commander Oberfuhrer Hermann Pister (1942 - 1945) commanded Buchenwald which was divided into three parts: the "large camp", which housed prisoners, the "small camp", where prisoners were kept in quarantine, and the "tent camp", set up for Polish prisoners sent there after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Besides those three parts were the camp factories, the SS barracks, and the administration compound.
Buchenwald: A Nazi Concentration camp
Location: Weimar
Established: 1937
Liberation: April 11, 1945, by U.S. Army
Estimated number of Victims: more than 56,000
Subcamps: 174
Camp was built by prisoners
Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and other Auschwitz Subcamps
Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp. It was located thirty-seven miles west of Krakow. Auschwitz was both an extensive Nazi concentration camp as well as the largest death camp at which Jews were exterminated by means of poison gas.
On April 27, 1940, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and German police, established Aushwitz near Oswiecim in Polish Eastern Upper Silesia after it had been annexed to the Third Reich after the defeat of Poland in September, 1938. Transports of prisoners were brought into the camp by Nazis around the beginning of June in 1940. Even though the camp consisted of Polish at first, Auschwitz soon became known as the harshest of the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazi system of torturing prisoners was shown here in its cruelest form. Block Eleven bunker was set up specifically for punishments and in front of that building stood the "Black Wall" where the frequent execution of prisoners took place.
A second, larger section of the camp was ordered to be constructed by Himmler in March 1941. It was called Auschwitz Birkenau and was located 1.9 miles from the original camp. It soon became the most populated of the Auschwitz complex and had a womens section established on August 16 after it was established in the main camp in March of 1941. The first women imprisoned in Auschwitz were nine hundred and ninty-nine German women from Ravensbruck camp and nine hundred and ninty-nine Jewish women from Poprad, Slovakia. More than six thousand women were prisoners in the new section by the end of March, 1942. Birkenau prisoners were mostly Jews, Poles, Germans, and for a time, the camps of Czech Jews and the Gypsy family camp was located there. The Crematoria and gas chambers of the Auschwitz killing center also operated in Birkenau.
Auschwitz the third was built in nearby Monowitz (Buna-Monowitz). It was mainly made up of forced labor camps. The most important ones being Czechowitz, Budy, Gleiwitz, Furstengrube, and Rasjsko. Jews were the chief inmates and were worked to the point of total exhaustion for German firms. Another forty-five subcamps were built throughout time among them were I. G. Farben, Oberschlesische Hydriewerke, Deutsche Gasrusswerke, and Erdol Raffinerie.
Treblinka
Built in the spring of 1942 and the first transports arrived in August. The camp was surrounded by a high barbed wire fence camouflaged with interwoven greenery to hide what was happening inside. Treblinka was initially supervised by SS-Obersturmfuhrer Imfried Eberl. SS-Obersturmfuhrer Franz Stangl replaced him in August 1942 with Kurt Franz as deputy commandant.
Belzec
Located in Poland, it started operating in 1942 and was about half a mile from the Lublin railroad. At least 434,508 Jews died at Belzec and the lack of survivors might be the reason why much isn't known about this camp. Only two Jews are known to have survived Belzec: Rudolf Reder and Chaim Herszman.
Sobibór
The name Sobibór was the name of the village outside of the camp which was in Poland. It began gassing in May of 1942 but it was one of the sites of the three successful rebellions in which half of the inmates escaped. Even though most were tracked down and killed. The Nazis closed the camp and planted a forest over it.
Lublin (also called Majdanek)
About two and a half miles from Lublin, it wasn't hidden away like most camps and it wasn't surrounded by a security zone. The camp was one of the 'nicer' ones a prisoner could go to because it was so open.
Chelmno
Chelmno was the first extermination camp opened in 1941 and was also the first to use poison gas. At least 152,000 people were exterminated there. Most of them were Jews from the surrounding area.
Special trains were organized by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office; RSHA) to contain Jews from occupied countries in Europe. They began arriving daily. In each of the trains, one thousand to several thoursand victums were forcibly brought in by the Nazis from liquidated ghettos in Poland, in other eastern European countries, and from countries in the west and south as well. The trains stopped at a special siding track that had been built within the camps. Its platform, called a rampa, became the busiest railway station in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with one particular difference. People only arrived there and never left again. During 1942, transports arrived from cities in Poland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Theresienstadt. Around 1944, Jews from Nazi invaded Hungary started to arrive in various camps. These transports were soon followed by ones from Lodz, the last ghetto to be liquidated in Poland. This transport went to Auschwitz-Birkenau along with transports of Gypsies and Polish political prisoners who were gassed.
When the trains with Jewish transports stopped at the railway platforms (rampas) at the
concentration camps they were forced to leave their personal belongings in the cars and evit
the cars in a great hurry. When they arrived in the proper location outside they were made
to form two lines, men and women separately. These lines had to move quickly to the place where SS officers were conducting the selection, directing the majority to one side to die in the gas chambers or to the other, which mean designation for forced labor. Those who were
sent to the gas chambers were killed that same day and their corpses were burned in the
crematoria. Those allowed to live would be registered and received numbers
tattooed on their left arm. Four hundred and five thousand prisoners of different nationalities were registered this way. The belongings left in the cars by the incoming victums were gathered by a forced labor detachment.Then they were sent to a part of the camp
called the "quarantine", where their hair was shorn, whether man or woman, and they were given
prisoners garb. in the quarantine, a prisoner that was soon transferred to slave labor,
could survive only for a few weeks; while in forced labor camps, the average life expectancy
was extended to a few months. After that time, many of the prisoners became so weak and
emaciated that they could hardly move or react to their surroundings. It was no wonder that
every prisoner tried to get out of concentration camps. Some were directed to different work
in different branches of the camp.
One of the most dreaded institutions in the camps was roll call. It occurred early in the
morning, late in the afternoon, and occasionally in the middle of the night. Inmates were made
to stand at attention, motionless, and they were usually barely clad for many hours in the cold,rain, and snow. Anyone who stumbled or fell was sent to be gassed.
Lengthy series of duties and commands were the divisions of a prisoners day. Some duties were
dictated by camp routine while others were result of an order from a higher official. They could
be directed at the whole camp, one group, or one person.
An inmate's mental and physical capacities were unceasingly employed in an effort to get through
the stages of an ordinary day - waking at dawn, straightening one's pallet, morning roll call,
going to work, laboring, standing in line for meals, returning to camp, block inspections,
and evening roll call.
Prisoners could also be selected for pseudo-scientific medical experiments. Young Jewish men
and women were usually the ones the 'experiments' were carried out upon. They underwent
unbelievable suffering and torture. Dwarves, twins, and children were usually selected for the
experiments.
Prisoners were killed in many creative ways.
- Gas chambers using Zyklon B gas were disguised to resemble shower rooms. Unsuspecting arrivals were usually told that they'd be sent to work after a disinfecting shower. Prisoners would frequently just be rotated into the chambers, usually knowing what fate lied ahead.
- Electically charged barbed-wire fences would surround some camps on the walls that
posted guards with machine guns and automatic rifles patrolled.
- A special group formed in Russia and Poland called the Einsatzgrewpen were created to kill
Jews. From time to time they would make Jewish peoples dig large pits, stand over them, and
commence to shooting them so that they would just fall in because then they were easy to bury.
- Firing lines were also not uncommon in camps. Prisoners would be lined up along one of the
walls of the barracks and SS officers would pick them off using their guns. Whole lines of
prisoners may have been executed or just a random few.
- Roll call frequently brought death to many prisoners. Sometimes standing out for hours,
exhausted inmates would move, stumble, or pass out, causing them be killed or sent to the
gas chambers on the spot.
Despite severe conditions in the camps, prisoners still offered constant resistance
to their captors. Mutual help was the main type of resistance but there were many instances
when physical resistance and sabotage occurred. One unidentified Jewish woman
arrived in Auschwitz on October 23, 1943, in a transport from Bergen-Belsen. Together,
with women who were led to the gas chambers, pulled a pistol out of the hands of an
SS man and shot two others. They were Oberscharfuhrer Schillinger and Unterscharfuhrer Emmerich.
Another very common for of resistance was escape. Many prisoners would escape under the most
difficult conditions. Most would not get far before they were brought back to the camp and
executed. Usually in front of other prisoners so they would be an example.
A well-known successful escape was that of two young Jews, Alfred
Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg, on April 7, 1944. Their detailed account of Auschwitz
was smuggled out into the free world.
In the free world Jewish leaders demanded that the Allied
powers bomb Auschwitz. This could well have stopped the continuation
of the mass murders but was never carried out.
In the Sonderkommando camp, prisoners organized an uprising that took
place on October 7, 1944. They destroyed one of the gas chamber but all the
participants of the uprising fell in battle. The SS discovered later that a group of young
Jewish women from the Monoqitz camp, who were led by Roza Robota, had smuggled and supplied
the Sonderkommando with gunpowder that was used in the uprising. Robota and three other women
were executed on January 6, 1945.
In 1945, the Soviet army started an offensive and the Nazis started making hasty withdrawals.
In Auschwitz, the fifty-eight thousand prisoners, most of them Jewish, were driven out of the
camps and put on death marches. Most of them were killed and others were murdered even before
the camps were evacuated. As liberating armies entered camps they found prisoners just recently
killed and prisoners who were sick and exhausted. The haste in which the Germans withdrawaled
from their camps kept them from dealing with the unmoveable prisoners who were able to be
helped by the Liberators.
How Many Were Killed?
Auschwitz was the largest graveyard in human history. The number of Jews murdered in the
gas chambers of Birkenau is estimated at up to one and a half million people: men, women, and
children. Almost one-quarter of the Jews killed during World War II were murdered in Auschwitz
. Of the 405,000 registered prisoners who received Auschwitz numbers, only a part survived;
and of the 16,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were brought there, only 96 survived.
The horrors of the Holocaust became even more famous when the War Crime Trials were
held towards the ending of World War II. Many Nazi officials were charged with various
crimes towards Jews and other races. Most were give the same fate their prisoners had gotten,
prison and death.
Here is a group of people inside a death camp. Don't they look like they're enjoying themselves? (Insert swift kick in the butt here)
Victims in death camps often numbered in hundreds of thousands...
Below you will find two equally descriptive maps maps of the death camps and extermination centers that were around during the holocaust.
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