concentration camps

concentration camps These large prison camps were first used in Cuba (1896), and in the Boer War, when around 160,000 Boers were interned, around 30,000 of whom died. However, it was in Nazi Germany that they were systematically used, first to imprison opponents of the regime but increasingly also during the Holocaust to imprison and murder those whom Nazi ideology considered ‘undesirable’, in particular Jews, but also Jehovah's Witnesses, priests, homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill. Since Hitler's ideology was founded and focused upon the hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks (i.e. Communists), two groups which he considered to be synonymous, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 heralded a new phase in the mass murder of Jews in all of German-occupied Europe. New camps were built, including six ‘extermination camps’, whose sole purpose was the killing of Jews. The German drive to kill all Jews was given its final sanction in the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. Although the mass killing of Jews was already under way, a number of SS leaders and high-ranking Nazi officials met in Berlin to approve the Endlösung (final solution) to what they considered to be the ‘Jewish problem’, in effect their mass murder. In the following years, the Nazis were ruthlessly effective at carrying out their plans. It is estimated that of a total of around seven million interned persons, only around 500,000 people survived.

Auschwitz; Warsaw Ghetto; Warsaw Rising;

Table 5. Concentration camps 1933–1945^a

	Opened/liberatedb	No. of Prisoners	No. of Dead
aThe figures given here are only rough estimates, especially in the case of the extermination camps.
bSome of the camps were destroyed by the retreating Germans before they were reached by the Allies.
cMany of those who survived the transit camps died after being transported to the extermination camps.
Forced Labour Camps
Dachau	Mar. 1933/Apr. 1945	210,000	32,000
Sachsenhausen	Aug. 1936/Apr. 1945	200,000	45,000
Buchenwald	June 1937/Apr. 1945	240,000	43,000
Flossenbürg	May 1938/Apr. 1945	100,000	30,000
Mauthausen (Austria)	June 1938/May 1945	200,000	120,000
Ravensbrück	May 1939/Apr. 1945	130,000	50,000
Neuengamme	June 1940/May 1945	106,000	55,000
Auschwitz (Poland)	June 1940/Jan. 1945	410,000	340,000
Gros-Rosen	Aug. 1940/Feb. 1945	125,000	40,000
Natzweiler (Alsace)	May 1941/Sept. 1944	50,000	25,000
Stutthof (Poland)	Sept. 1939/Jan. 1945	115,000	65,000
Bergen-Belsen	Apr. 1943/Apr. 1945	100,000	70,000
Mittelbau-Dora	Aug. 1943/Apr. 1945	60,000	20,000
Vaivara (Estonia)	Sept. 1943/Oct. 1944	20,000	10,000
Kraków-Plaszów (Poland)	Jan. 1944/Jan. 1945	50,000	50,000
Extermination Camps
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland)	Nov. 1941/Jan. 1945	3,000,000	1,500,000
Chelmno (Poland)	Dec. 1941/Jan. 1945	200,000	200,000
Sobibor (Poland)	May 1942/Nov. 1943	250,000	250,000
Lublin/Majdanek (Poland)	Apr. 1943/July 1944	500,000	260,000
Treblinka (Poland)	July 1942/Nov. 1943	750,000	750,000
Belzec (Poland)	Mar. 1943/June 1943	600,000	600,000
Transit Campsc
Herzogenbosch (the Netherlands)	Jan. 1943/Sept. 1944	35,000	2,000
Kaunas (Lithuania)	Sept. 1943/July 1944	3,000	2,000
Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia)	Nov. 1941/Apr. 1945	140,000	35,000