Concentration Camps

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War 2 began. This is when Adolf Hitler rose to power. During his reign, he sought to exterminate all the Jewish people. The Nazis saw the Jews as enemies to the German people so they had them prosecuted relentlessly. They strongly believed that the Jews wanted to rule the world and that they deserved no living space of their own because of this (Nazi Ideology and Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution). One way he went about doing this was the use of the many concentration camps scattered across German occupied Europe. He had millions kept prisoner in these camps during the course of the war. When we think about the holocaust, we generally also think of these concentration camps where so many Jews were forced to live. However, there were other kinds of people kept in the camps other than Jews. This is because Germany had been using the camps before the war to hold others whom they saw as undesirable. All the people in the camps had to face the horrible treatment, nonetheless. The first camp began to operate in March of 1933, but by the end of World War II, the Germans had more than 4,000 all across Europe (Daily Life in the Concentration Camps). From 1933 to 1945, Germany had about 20,000 camps in operation in all. Jewish people in places where the Nazis were in control were the first to be taken away to the camps. They were used for a wide variety of purposes like forced labor camps, transit camps(where prisoners were only kept temporarily), and extermination camps which were built only for killing. Prisoners would be taken from their homes and usually passed through several camps before getting to the extermination camp, which would be most prisoners’ final destinatio...

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"Concentration Camp System: In Depth." 2014. Untited States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 18 March 2014 .

"Daily Life in the Concentration Camps." 2014. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 18 March 2014 .

"Forced Labor in the Holocaust: Background and Overview." 2014. Jewish Virtual Library. 20 March 2014 .

"Nazi Ideology and Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution." 2014. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 19 March 2014 .

Segev, Tom. Soldiers of Evil. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1987.