concentration camps

concentration camps See also GUlag; see Map 31 for sites of principal concentration camps.

Concentration camps were one of the most important instruments of terror in Nazi Germany. Forecast by Hitler as early as 1921, they were first employed in 1933. At first German political opponents of National Socialism became ‘persons in protective custody’, to be joined from 1939 by people from all German-occupied territories. ‘Protective custody’, a measure employed by the Nazi police organizations, was detention without trial which gave no consideration to the due process of law.

1933–4

Immediately Hitler came to power in January 1933 the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Detachment), the paramilitary organization known as the Brownshirts, created several hundred small detention centres in cellars and other places. Then in March they set up the first larger camps at Nohra in Thuringia and Oranienburg in Prussia, while the SS and Bavarian Political Police opened the Dachau camp the same month. By that autumn the Prussian state concentration camps of Sonnenburg, Lichtenburg, Börgermoor, Esterwegen, and Brandenburg were established, as was the Sachsenburg camp in Saxony. Between March 1933 and August 1934 up to 80,000 people were imprisoned.

In May 1934 the SS took over the running of the concentration camps from the SA. Most of the original camps were closed and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, appointed the former commandant of Dachau, Theodor Eicke, as Inspector of Concentration Camps with the job of reorganizing them. Eicke closed the last SA camps, standardized the administration of the others, and established the SS Death's Head formations, the concentration camp guards. From then on Eicke's Concentration Camp Inspection Office was responsible for the conditions in the camps while incarcerations and releases were effected by the Gestapo, which maintained its own Political Division in each camp. By June 1935 there were just five camps with approximately 3,500 prisoners: Esterwegen (322), Lichtenburg (706), Moringen (49 women), Dachau (about 1,800), and Sachsenburg (678).

1935–9

In 1935 Hitler approved the expansion of the SS Death's Head formations and the construction of five new large camps. Preventive Gestapo raids, especially against communists, but also against so-called ‘anti-social’ persons such as gypsies and persons with a minor criminal record as well as professional criminals, led to a significant increase in the number of prisoners. Thus, on 1 November 1936 there were already 4,761 prisoners, and after the pogroms against the German Jews of November 1938 more than 50,000, but by April 1939 these numbers had decreased again, to 21,000. In addition to ‘combating enemies of the state’ the concentration camps now had a further, initially secondary, task: exploitation of the forced labour of their prisoners. New camp sites were now no longer selected solely by previous criteria such as seclusion and good transport routes, but also for their proximity to SS factories.

The first of these new large camps arose in Sachsenhausen near Berlin in July 1936. This took in the prisoners from the former Esterwegen camp and from the end of 1936 to the end of 1938 the numbers of prisoners there rose from 2,000 to exceed 8,000. In the summer of 1937, Buchenwald camp was set up near Weimar in Thuringia, and the camps in Sachsenburg and Lichtenburg were closed. Buchenwald was planned for 3,000 prisoners at first, later for 12,000. At the same time the Dachau camp was considerably expanded. Following the Anschluss (union) of Austria with Germany in the spring of 1938, Mauthausen camp was set up near Linz. A decisive factor in the choice of this site, as for Flossenbürg camp which was built at the same time, was the proximity of large stone quarries in which the prisoners were forced to work, often until they dropped. For female prisoners, who were initially confined in Moringen and later in Lichtenburg, the Ravensbrück camp was built to accommodate several thousand prisoners. These projects completed Eicke's system of concentration camps; after this he commanded the SS Death's Head Division until his death on the Eastern Front in 1943; he was succeeded in November 1939, by Richard Glücks, who retained the position of Inspector of Concentration Camps until 1945.

A standard concentration camp such as Dachau was divided into five departments. Department I comprised the commandant and his staff; Department II was the Political Department, headed by a Gestapo officer; Department III, headed by a senior SS officer, was responsible for camp conditions and for selecting of SS Block Leaders and key inmates who exercised unlimited authority in the camp. Department IV was the administration; and Department V was the medical staff. The guard units, the SS Death's Head formations, were in a separate chain of command and were only under the tactical command of the camp commandant. From 1940 all concentration camps were part of the Waffen-SS.

1939–41

With the German invasion of Poland (seePolish campaign) the number of prisoners in the camps rose dramatically. New camps were built at Neuengamme near Hamburg ( 1940), at Stutthof near Danzig ( 1941), at Gross-Rosen near Breslau ( 1941), and at Natzweiler in Alsace ( 1941). Auschwitz near Cracow and Majdanek near Lublin, first planned as prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, later became both concentration and extermination camps. Not included among the concentration camps were the extermination camps of OPERATION REINHARD in which from the end of 1941 the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews began.

1942–4

The prisoners, of whom only a minority were Germans by now, no longer worked in SS factories, but provided slave labour for the entire German armaments industry. Himmler wanted to set up factories in the camps, but was not able to prevail against the armaments minister, Albert Speer, who preferred a number of small camps near munitions factories. In the following years well over 1,000 satellite camps were set up.

This new phase also made itself apparent in the organization of the camps. In March 1942 the Concentration Camp Inspection Office was integrated as Group D into the SS Main Office of Economy and Administration directed by Oswald Pohl. From then on, the factories ordered prisoners directly from Group D, and the concentration camps charged the firms for the slave labour, the money being collected by the SS for the Reich ministry of finance.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) the number of prisoners increased again. Following Hitler's commissar order, thousands of Soviet officers were murdered in the camps, more than 22,000 in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald alone. Several thousand other Soviet enlisted men and officers starved in the winter of 1941–2 in specially isolated barracks which were given the cryptic name ‘POW work camps’. Some camps included special enclosures (Sonder lager) for prominent prisoners. Stalin's son was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen before his murder, as were the former Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, Hitler's would-be assassin Georg Elser, and some prominent Allied POW in Dachau.

In a few camps, especially in Auschwitz and Dachau, the SS and the Luftwaffe conducted medical experiments on inmates which were generally fatal (see Mengele and medicine). The SS also selected sick inmates in all camps under the codename ‘Aktion 14 f 13’ who where then killed with poison gas as part of the euthanasia programme.

In 1942–3 other camps were taken over by the SS as concentration camps. These included ones at Riga, Kauen, and Vaivara in Ostland as well as the Krankenlager (sick camp) Bergen-Belsen used exclusively for Jewish prisoners. At the same time from 1942 to 1944 more than a million Jews were murdered with the gas zyklon-B in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In 1944 the network of concentration camps reached its zenith. Parts of the armaments industry were moved below ground. Flossenbürg prisoners produced aircraft for Messerschmitt underground, and Neuengamme prisoners set up gigantic factory complexes in the caves of Porta Westfalica. In October 1944 the Dora-Mittelbau camp near Nordhausen in the Harz mountains, until then a satellite command of Buchenwald, was converted into an independent camp. Here, components for the V-weapons were produced under unimaginable conditions.

Since 1939 the number of registered camp prisoners had risen from 25,000 to 60,000 (end of 1941), 98,600 ( July 1942), more than 200,000 ( May 1943), to about 225,000 ( August 1943). From July 1942 to June 1943 alone, more than 110,000 died in the camps, which does not include the prisoners executed or brought into the camps for execution. This corresponds to a death rate of over 10% which, after a temporary decrease at the end of 1943, was to climb still higher in 1944–5. Malnutrition and hunger, epidemics, and mass murder marked daily life in the camps. On 15 January 1945 the SS had 511,537 male and 202,674 female prisoners registered in the concentration camps.

1944–5

The last phase of the concentration camps was characterized by chaos and mass death. In July 1944 Majdanek was liberated by Soviet troops. The closer the Allied forces came to the German border, the more frantically the SS attempted to herd prisoners from the threatened areas into the middle of Germany. In January 1945 probably more than 60,000 prisoners were sent on forced marches towards Dachau, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and Mauthausen. At least 15,000 of them died or were shot on the way. In all camps, especially in Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, many weak prisoners were singled out to be killed with injections or gas. About 7,000 prisoners of the Neuengamme camp were put on ships in the Bay of Lübeck which were then attacked and sunk by British aircraft. Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945, Bergen-Belsen on 15 April, and Dachau on 30 April. The pictures of the people whom the American and British troops found there, starving or dead, revealed the full extent of the Nazi terror to the world at large for the first time. In Bergen-Belsen alone, 34,000 people died between February 1945 and the liberation, after which another 13,000 died by the end of June 1945 despite all the medical efforts of the British troops. Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau became synonyms for the inhuman dictatorship of National Socialism.

The number of prisoners and dead in the concentration camps can only be estimated approximately. Altogether, there were 1,600,000 registered prisoners and 450,000 deaths are documented, though a number exceeding 600,000 dead is more probable. However this does not include the victims of the Final Solution in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, and Majdenek, and in the extermination camps of Operation REINHARD.

Johannes Tuchel

Bibliography

Kogon, E. , The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (New York, 1950).
Pingel, F. , Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft. Widerstand, Selbstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager (Hamburg, 1978).
Tuchel, J. , Konzentrationslager. Organizationsgeschichte und Funktion der ‘Inspektion der Konzentrationslager’ 1934–1938 (Boppard, 1991).