According to Goldhagen (1996), “The ‘camp’ was Germany’s largest and most important institutional innovation during its Nazi period. The number of camps (estimated at more than
10 000) which the Germans established, maintained and staffed was staggering.”

There were transit camps, labour camps, prisoner of war camps, camps for children, camps for women, concentration camps and extermination camps.

Dachau, in southern Germany, was the first camp, serving as a model for all subsequent ones. Later followed other major camps including Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. There were numerous camps established in all the countries occupied by the Nazis. The six major extermination camps were all in Poland. They were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Chelmno.

In general, the camps were places where inmates were concentrated and either killed immediately, or killed by or after being put to forced labour. The overwhelming majority of camp inmates were Jews, but there were also hundreds of thousands of non-Jews. These non-Jewish camp inmates included Jehovahs Witnesses, homosexuals, the mentally ill, the chronically sick and opponents of the Nazi regime. (See Non-Jewish Victims.)

Transit Camps
Transit camps served as collection points for Jews. All the Eastern European ghettos functioned as transit camps and others were established in Western Europe as the Nazi occupation spread. From Drancy in Paris, France, 42 500 Jews were shipped to Auschwitz. From Mechelen in Belgium 26 500 Jews were also transported there. In Holland was Westerbork camp, where some Jews were known to have stayed for more than two years. Eventually, however, over 100 000 Jews were deported from there to the concentration and death camps in the East.

On the way to the gas chambers after Selektion

In the Camps
Usually when a transport arrived at a camp, it was met by camp guards and all those people who had survived the journey were hustled off the trains with shouts, whips, dogs and guns. They were lined up on the platform and if the camp had extermination facilities, they underwent a Selektion (“selection”) process. The young and the healthy were selected to remain alive and work, while all the children, women carrying babies and old people were sent on the path to the gas chambers. There they were gassed to death and later their bodies were either buried in mass graves or burned by Jewish slave labourers. (See the chart explaining the selection process.)

Inmates selected for work were first issued with striped prison-style uniforms made of coarse cloth. As the war continued, however, clothing was in short supply and prisoners were given either rags or clothing taken from the victims of the gas chambers. A woman might receive only a nightgown as her ‘clothing’, together with a mismatched pair of shoes of the wrong size, or else no shoes at all. Naturally this clothing gave no protection from the winter cold, and many prisoners wrapped paper (if they could find any) around their bodies for extra warmth. Extremely poor sanitary conditions meant that clothing was usually torn, dirty or soiled by urine and faeces. The same clothing was worn for months and often years, without change or washing.

Life, or rather ‘existence’, in a concentration camp was a horrific experience. Inmates were housed in rows of huts or primitive barracks. These were built of timber, with sometimes straw on bare ground or wooden or concrete floors. In the huts at Auschwitz, for example, three or four tiers of 148 bunks were shared by two or more adults per bunk, meaning there was no room to turn over. There were no mattresses, blankets, soap, cutlery, underwear or shoes, though inmates were sometimes issued with wooden clogs. There was generally one tap per building, with water for only one hour per day. Malnutrition and disease (especially dysentery) were everywhere, and there was neither medicine nor doctors to ease the pain of dying.

Daily experiences in a concentration camp would include: brutal beatings with whips or on special whipping tables, imprisonment in isolation bunkers, forced standing or running punishments (often done naked and in extremes of temperature), electric shock torture and public hangings. The ultimate purpose of the Nazi death camp was the extermination of its inmates, so ‘work’ there was really nothing more than a means to death. Whereas in normal life work means life, payment, etc., the Nazis used it here as a way of killing prisoners by simply exhausting them physically. Sometimes the work had some actual purpose, but usually not; its purpose was only to kill Jews without wasting bullets, gas or food. Prisoners were only kept alive as long as they could work, and conditions were meant to kill them after extracting the maximum of labour from them.

Camp inmates were hired out by the SS as slave labourers to over 200 German companies. These companies used Jewish slave labour because it was cheap, and the wages were a main source of income for the SS. Some companies (including B.M.W. and the Deutsche Bank) financed the building of concentration camps where the work was done for them. Chemical giant I.G. Farben had slave labourers producing the Zyklon B gas that was used to kill their families. In February 1999 a fund was set up by 12 of Germany’s largest corporations to pay compensation to any of their slave labourers who survived. Members of the fund included Volkswagen, B.M.W., Daimler-Benz (now Daimler-Chrysler), Krupp, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and Degussa-Huels.