NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND THE HOLOCAUST

The Nazis created a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate "enemies of the state." Most of the prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social-Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Christian clergy, and people accused of "asocial" or abnormal behavior.

The first concentration camp was opened in the city of Dachau in March 1933, just two months after Hitler was appointed as Reich Chancellor.
After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Nazis arrested German and Austrian Jews and imprisoned them in the camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen in Germany. After the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis carried out mass arrests of Jewish men and imprisoned them in camps for short periods.

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Special SS teams called "Skull Units" (Totenkopfverbände) guarded the camps, competing with each other in cruelty. During World War II, Nazi doctors conducted experiments on prisoners in some camps. Under the impact of the war, the Nazi camp system grew rapidly. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps for militar industry where thousands of prisoners died of exhaustion and starvation.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis increased the number of prisoner-of-war camps. Some of the camps were built inside existing concentration camps, such as Auschwitz in occupied Poland. The Lublin camp, later known as Majdanek, was established in the autumn of 1941 as a prisoner of war camp and was converted into a concentration camp in 1943. Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were shot or gassed there.

To facilitate the "Final Solution" The systematic genocide of the Jews, the Nazis opened different death camps in Poland. Chelmno, the first extermination camp, opened in December 1941. There the Jews and Gypsies were gassed in trucks. In 1942 the Nazis opened Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka to systematically murder Polish Jews.

The Nazis built large gas chambers in the complexes to increase the efficiency of the process by mechanizing it as a simple industrial process. At Auschwitz, the Birkenau extermination camp had four gas chambers. At the end of the deportations, up to 8,000 Jews were gassed each day for a total of 1 million during its period of operation.