Nazi concentration camps

::See also the related List of German concentration camps

Types of camp

The Nazi regime nominally maintained both kinds of concentration camps: labor camps (since the beginning of their regime in 1933) and extermination camps. In fact, it is difficult to draw a distinction between the two categories. Prisoners in many Nazi labor camps could often expect to be worked to death in short order, while prisoners in extermination camps usually died sooner in gas chambers or in other ways. Guards were known to use prisoners as targets in target practice.

Related Topics:
Labor camp - Extermination camp - Gas chamber

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Sometimes the concentration camps were used to hold important prisoners, such as the generals involved in the attempted assassination by bomb of Hitler, U-Boat captain turned Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris who was interned at Flossenburg starting February 7, 1945, until he was hanged on April 9th, shortly before the war's end.

Related Topics:
U-Boat - Lutheran - Martin Niemoller - Wilhelm Canaris - 1945

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The first Nazi camps were within Germany, and were primarily work camps. The worst excesses, including the murder of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Polish intellectuals, Soviet prisoners of war and others, took place later in the war principally in occupied Poland and Belarus, on the territory of the "General Government". (See Holocaust, genocide.) It is estimated that up to ten million people died in Nazi concentration camps; of them, six million were killed in the 15 larger camps.

Related Topics:
Jews - Homosexual - Gypsies - Jehovah's Witnesses - Polish - Soviet - Prisoners of war - Belarus - General Government - Holocaust - Genocide

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