Concentration+Camps

=World War II - German Concentration Camps=

Sara Skirda


 * Definition**

Concentration camps were camps in which people were detained without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment within a constitutional democratic state. The prisoners were held under harsh, inhumane conditions where people were worked to death.

The Start
In January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. Weeks after the Nazis came to power, the SS (//Schutzstaffel//), the SA (Sturmabteilungen), police, and civilian authorities started organizing detetion camps to capture all political figures who opposed the Nazi policies. Camps started popping up all over Germany to keep control of the masses of people being arrested. Due to the vast amount of prisoners, the SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, Esterwegen, Dachau and Lichtenburg. The German secret state police (the Gestapo) held prisoners under investigation until 1936. In July, 1934, during the Röhm purge, Hitler authorized Heinrich Himmler (leader of the Reich SS) to formalize the concentration camps into a system. Himmler then appointed SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke as the Inspector of Concentration camps.

In 1937, only 4 concentration camps were left; Dauchau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Litchenburg. As commandant of Dachau in 1933, Eicke made an procedures to administer a concentration camp. Regulations were issued for the duties of the guards and for the treatment of the prisoners. This organization developed at Dachau in 1933-1934 was later the model for the Nazi concentration camp system. Later on one of Eicke’s trainees at Dachau, Rudolf Höss, became the commander at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Expansion
In 1938 and 1939 as Nazi Germany expanded their conquest, the number of individuals labeled as political opponents increased, requiring new concentration camps to be built. Starting in 1934, prisoners were deployed as forced laborers to benefit the SS officers or even the expansion of the camps themselves. Economic considerations had an increasing impact on the selection of sites for concentration camps after 1937. concentration camp authorities started to instruct the prisoners to preform more goal-oriented, yet still backbreaking and dangerous labor in extractive industries.

With the start of World War II, the system expanded rapidly. The origional function of the camps was not changed by the war, however, the national emergency climate that the conflict granted to the Nazi leaders permitted the SS officers to expand the functions of the camps. Increasingly, the camps became sites where SS officers would target and kill large groups of people who were percieved as enemies of the Nazis. Regardless of the need for forced laborers, the SS officers deliberately undernourished, tortured, and mistreated the prisoners.



Years later in Nuremberg (November 1945), the first international war crimes trial took place. The city (Nuremberg) was significant because it was there that the National Socialist Party held their annual rallies. The people on trial were charged with conspiring wage of war, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity (including a newly defined crime of genocide), and other war crimes including murder, killing of prisoners and civilians and so on. Caught on tape, on the eighth day of the Nuremberg trials, a dramatic change in the nature of the prosecution took place.

Here is a video clip of the 8th day of the Nuremberg trials. media type="custom" key="23327666"

By Sara Skirda