Narrator: From Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, until the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazis imprisoned millions of people in tens of thousands of sites throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe. Many of these sites were called camps. Nazi camps were a key tool in the intimidation, persecution, and mass murder of people Nazis considered “dangerous or inferior.” This included political opponents, Roma, gay men, members of resistance groups, Polish people, Soviet prisoners of war, and Jews. People often refer to all Nazi camps as concentration camps. But concentration camps were just one type of Nazi camp. The Nazis established many types of camps including concentration camps, forced-labor camps, transit camps, and five killing centers, among others. In concentration camps, Nazi Germany imprisoned people indefinitely, outside of normal legal processes. The Nazis created a standardized system for the concentration camps. They were surrounded by barbed wire fences and watchtowers and guarded by special units. Prisoners were subjected to a dehumanizing daily existence. In most cases, their hair was cut off, and they were forced to wear prison uniforms. They were assigned prisoner numbers, instead of their names. Badges marked them as belonging to different prisoner groups. There was no guarantee they would ever be released. The first official concentration camp was Dachau, established in March 1933 to detain and terrorize political opponents. The prisoner population of concentration camps eventually expanded to include Jews, Roma, and others. In forced-labor camps, the Nazi regime and private companies brutally exploited prisoners’ labor. The Germans created these camps to support the German economy, and to meet labor shortages. Prisoners received little or no pay, and usually lacked proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest.
Mila Bachner (Holocaust Survivor): The gates opened up, and by the gate I saw girls that were like living zombies and skeletons and I said to myself, Dear God, is this what — what will become of me? The conditions were like this. We had not had water, and we didn't have much of cold water, but we had to keep clean. Not to have lice or a nit on your head. Or else you lose your hair or your life as a filthy Jew. We didn't have enough food to live or enough to die. So, it was starvation by hunger. These are the conditions.
Narrator: As part of their goal of killing all Jews in Europe, Nazi authorities rounded-up, imprisoned and deported Jews. During this process, they sometimes sent Jewish people to transit camps prior to deporting them. Most Jewish people spent only a few days in these camps, before being packed onto crowded trains. In many cases, these trains took them to their deaths in killing centers. Killing Centers, sometimes called “death camps” or “extermination camps” were camps that the Nazis created specifically to murder European Jews on a mass scale using poison gas. There were 5 killing centers: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than 2.7 million were murdered in the five killing centers. The Nazis also created other types of camps to imprison or punish groups of people such as captured enemy soldiers and Romani people. By the end of the Holocaust and World War II, millions of people died from exhaustion, starvation, and deliberate mass murder in the camps.
