Adolf Hitler, who authorised a political party called The Nazi Party in Germany, was one of the main reasons for the holocaust to exist in the 20th century. During these horrific events, many were killed in the gruesome system that was crafted by the Nazi regime to hold Jews and non-Jews. In this essay, there will be a discussion of what happened in the Concentration Camps, deaths, the different types of camps, the most infamous Nazi camps, what the people in Concentration Camps had faced during & after World War II.
The definition of a concentration camp is a place where a numerous amount of people, who usually have committed an offence, are confined into a small area to provide labour or to wait for their execution. Adolf Hitler entitled SS leader Heinrich Himmler to lead the Concentration Camps, with the help of SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke to organise Jews into a system.
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Back in the 20th century, Hitler made much Concentration around Germany to hold Jews and non-Jews like Roma, disabled people, Jehovahs Witnesses, homosexuals, gipsies, etc. The main reason for these camps was to keep everyone secured in one area and not to be in the presence of Germans. Everyone got a different symbol (usually a triangle), colours and digits so Nazis could easily recognise the group they were stereotyped in. Hitler wanted to control/dominance over Germany and to get rid of Jews forever. He stated from his autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’ “...the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
Hundreds of subcamps for each of the concentration camps were created from 1942 to 1944, World War II. Each sub-camp was positioned in or near factories or sites to collect raw materials. An example of this is Wiener Neudorf, made in 1943, near an aeroplane factory located on the east side of Vienna, Austria. The Central SS authorities advised camp commandants to the limelight on keeping the prisoners alive. The concentration camps population, both Jewish and non-Jewish, endured fatal losses to starvation, exposure, diseases, and mistreatment during the last year of the war. The SS evacuated the concentration camps with the prisoners when the front approached due to not wanting them to be liberated. The prisoners had unfair treatment, walking on foot without any food, shelter, or clothing during the winter weather. Finally, from 1944 to 1945, the prisoners of the concentration camps were liberated. Unfortunately, deaths still occurred due to prisoners being too weak to survive.
Even though the Holocaust was over and they had got liberated, survivors still feared to return to their former homes and to rebuild their lives because of the antisemitism, the hatred of Jews. A large amount of Jews went to the town of Kielce in 1946 after the Polish riots, also known as pogroms (violent anti-Jewish riots), killed more than 42 Jews and beat many more. Madeline Deutsch, a survivor of Auschwitz, said “I was 18, but I was, in fact, only 13 because those years were nothing. Those were erased from my life” A lot of the homeless survivors migrated westward to other European territories by the Western Allies. Hundreds of them were housed in refugee centres and DP (displaced persons) camps, for example, Bergen-Belsen in Germany. May other Jews emigrate to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Mexico, South America, and South Africa.
The most infamous and largest Nazi camp was Auschwitz, also referred to as Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp. It was located near the town of Oświęcim in the south of Poland. SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss was the first commandant for this concentration camp. This camp was different to most; it was a prison camp, an extermination camp, and a salve-labour camp. From May 1940 to January 1845 around 1.1 to 1.5 million people died at this concentration camp, 90% of them were Jews.
There were many different types of concentration camps, for example, extermination camps, transit camps, labour camps, etc. For everyone that was imprisoned, the living conditions were outrageous. An extermination camp, also called a death camp or killing centre, first used gas vans then gas chambers to kill a massive amount of Jews. The 6 death camps were: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Transit camps were when Jews were imprisoned before they were deported to either a concentration camp, labour camp or one of the six Nazi extermination camps in Poland. Some examples of where transit camps were are Drancy in France, Mechelen in Belgium, and Vught and Westerbork in the Netherlands. The last camp is a labour camp, also known as a work camp, is where Jews were forced to do manual labour until they either died of exhaustion, starvation or hydration.
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