Concentration Camp

Concentration camps
Extermination camps (or concentration camps) were camps built by Nazi Germany during the Second World War (1939–45) to systematically kill millions of people by gassing and extreme work under starvation conditions. While there were victims from many groups, Jews were the main targets. This genocide of the Jewish people was the Third Reich's "Final Solution to the Jewishquestion. The Nazi attempts at Jewish genocide are collectively known as the Holocaust.
over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.
Most Holocaust historians identify six German Nazi extermination camps, all in occupied Poland; two of them, Chełmno and the Auschwitz II, in the western Polish areasannexed by Nazi Germany (October 1939), four in the General Government area.
1. Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau)
2. Chełmno
3. Belzec
4. Majdanek
5. Sobibor
6. Treblinka
Besides those six camps, there existed the little-known Maly Trostenets extermination camp, at Minsk, Belarus, in the anti-Communist Lokot Republic (July 1942–August 1943) established in the Nazi-occupiedUSSR; similar camps existed at Warsaw and Janowska. Moreover, inYugoslavia there existed the Jasenovac concentration camp (August 1941–April 1945), which was the only central extermination camp outside of Poland, and the only one not operated by Nazis, but by the fascist Ustaše forces of the Independent State of Croatia, the majority of whose victims were Orthodox Christian Serbs, Roma, and Jews.The formal mass-killing method at an extermination camp was poison gas (made to order by the IG Farben chemicals company); besides gas chambers, the camp guards continued killing prisoners via mass shooting, starvation, torture, etc. After the war, the diary of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss, revealed that psychologically "unable to endure wading through blood any longer",many Einsatzkommandos—the killers — either went mad or killed themselves.
Operationally, there were three types of death camp:
(1) Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, where prisoners were promptly killed upon arrival. Initially, the camps used carbon monoxide gas chambers; at first, the corpses were buried, but then incinerated atop pyres. Later, gas chambers and crematoria werebuilt in Treblinka and Belzec; Zyklon-B was used in Belzec.[33]
(2) Concentration–extermination camps where some prisoners were selected for slave labor, instead of immediate death; they were kept alive as camp inmates, available to work wherever the Nazis required. These camps — including Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Jasenovac — later were retrofitted with Zyklon-B gas chambers and crematoria,remaining operational until war's end in 1945.[34]
(3) Minor extermination camps such as Sajmiste in Serbia, Maly Trostenets in the USSR, Janowska, in Poland, and Gornija Rijeka, initially operated as prisons and transit camps, then as extermination camps late in the war, using portable gas-chambers and gas vans. Gas vans were initially developed at the Chelmno extermination camp, before being usedelsewhere.[35]
The corpses were incinerated in crematoria and the ashes either buried or scattered; yet, at Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno, the corpses were incinerated on pyres. The efficiency of industrialised killing at Auschwitz-Birkenau produced too many corpses to adequately burn or bury, so the crematoria (manufactured to specification by Topf und Söhne) were put into use tohandle the disposals around the clock, day and night.[36]
Systematic killing
Each extermination camp operated differently, yet each was designed for quick and efficient industrialized killing. SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS, during the war told a Swedish diplomat of life in a death camp, of how, on 19 August 1942, he arrived at Belzec extermination...