Three Types of Nazi Camps - Term Paper Example

Three Types of Nazi Camps 1. Introduction After coming to power in 1933, the Nazi regime started building a widespread network of camps of various categories. Basically, camps were confinement centers where Nazi regime detained its victims without any trial (“Concentration Camps” 1-2). Between 1933 and 1945, millions of men, children, and women of various ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds were imprisoned in various kinds of camps for security, social, ethnic, religious, ideological, and political reasons. Local defense corps and police forces constructed initial camps in 1933. Later, the Nazi regime implemented a well-organized and centrally controlled camp system (Vogelsang and Larsen). After occupying neighboring countries, the Nazi authority developed a network of different types of camps, such as concentration camps, forced-labor camps, and extermination camps, focusing on different motives and functions (Lepage 93). Over the 12 years of ruling, the Nazi regime constructed around 43000 Nazi camps and ghettos throughout Europe, especially in countries like, Poland, Russia, France, and Germany itself. Over the years, millions of Nazism’s victims were brutally tortured, abused, and murdered in these camps. Consequently, these camps soon emerged as the symbol of the black history of Nazi oppression and barbarity (Historiann). The purpose of this paper is to research main types, i.e., concentration camps, forced-labor camps, and extermination camps, of Nazi camps and analyze their major attributes and functions. 2. The Concentration Camps Concentration camp is defined as the guarded, fenced territory for the imprisonment or detention of individuals, foreigners, political opponents, or members of particular ethnic minorities, who are randomly confined, usually under rough conditions (Lepage 93). The first Nazi concentration camp was established in Dachau in 1933 during the period when the Hitler was still taking over Germany. The initial concentration camps were meant for political prisoner which include, social democrats, communists, dissidents and active opponent figures who posed a potential threat to the new Nazi regime (Lepage 93-95). Soon the SS (Schutzstaffel) forces and the Nazi authorities began to confine members from various communities, such as homosexuals under the false accusation of criminal offense; similarly, women for prostitution, Jehovah’s Witnesses for practicing own religious activities, and people who were tagged as “asocial” or “threat to national interests” mainly because they were beggars, homeless, or to some extent found unsuitable into Nazi society. In 1936, during the preparation for the Berlin Olympics, the Nazi police forces arrested many local poor people, including street people, gypsies (Roma and Sinti) under false charges and confined them in concentration camps in order to “clean up” the city (“Auschwitz”). However, After the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), the Nazi regime confined thousands of male Jews above the age of 13 years. After 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and Poland, several thousands of Austrian, German and Polish Jews were detained in Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. These prisoners were subjected to inhumane treatment, given hardly any food or water and tortured till death (“Different types of camps”). Each of the 23 main camps had sub-camps, nearly 900 of them in total with over 10,000 smaller camps. These included camps with euphemistic names, such as “care facilities for foreign children,” where pregnant prisoners were transferred for forced abortions (“The Holocaust”). The concentration camps were run under a complicated bureaucracy of Nazi German authority. Every camp had a main commander who was responsible for all operations in the camp. Under his command, there were various officers responsible for specific sectors. For instance, the Schutzhftlagerfuhrer was responsible for controlling prisoners; the chief administrator was in charge of finance-related matters; also, there was a team of doctors, engineers, deputies, and others; and finally, hundreds of security guards. Mainly, the security guards were from Nazi SS forces which were not considered good enough forces for deploying in the battlefield (Soumerai and Schulz 179-180). The concentration camps were not the same as the extermination camps which were built only for mass killings of Jews and other victims. Despite it, the concentration camps caused the death of thousands of victims due to brutal treatment, disease, hunger, random executions, and excessive torture (“The Killing Machine”). 3. The Forced-labor Camps As the WWII progressed after 1940, the difference between concentration camps and forced-labor camps became thinner as the majority of concentration camps were transformed into forced-labor camps (“Concentration Camps” 1). The labor camps were used to exploit the prisoners by forcing them to work till death, a process known as the annihilation through excessive labor. Such labor camps were built throughout Poland and the occupied Soviet Union during the WWII. There were various types of labor camps, such as the all purpose labor camps, training camps, labor camps for civilians, and labor camps for war prisoners. According to official reports, there were over 12.5 million forced laborers in the camps allover Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. The slave labors include war prisoners and civilians from Luxemburg, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Norway, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The majority (over 4 millions) of slaves were from Russia and Ukraine (“Slave Labor in Nazi Germany”). The Jews and foreign prisoners were forced to work in agriculture, military infrastructure, industrial sectors, and mining. The forced-labor camps were significant for the Nazi Germany during the war. By the late 1940, it would become impossible for the Nazi regime to produce sufficient food production to supply all its citizens without the exploitation of slave labors in fields. In the early 1940, Jewish labor battalions were formed which were particularly exploited for the development of an infrastructure crucial for the war. The importance of Jewish labor battalions became more visible after 1942 when the war was at its peak over 300,000 Jews labored for the Hungarian army (“The Holocaust”). In the labor camps, the Nazi authority implemented hierarchy system, influenced by the divide and rule ideology. The prisoners were distinguished according to their races and ethnic backgrounds and accordingly assigned different works. In this racial hierarchy system, Aryans were on the top and Jews were at the bottom. Some of the prisoners from the higher-ranking groups were selected as the supervisors for barracks. These supervisors were often brutal to other inmates in order to establish trusting relation with the guards and to prove their physical toughness in pursuit of more privileges, power, and goods for themselves. Such practices further worsened the situations in the camps for prisoners and highlighted the evil nature of Nazi ideology and system (“Auschwitz”). Prisoners from disintegrated and enemy states, like Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and France were in miserable conditions and had no protection. Prisoners from countries, like Hungary and Bulgaria had almost similar conditions like German prisoners. Dutch and Norwegians were considered as “Aryans” and therefore, they suffered from less discrimination. On the other hand, Jews and Slavic were considered as inferior races and suffered from immense torture and harsh conditions (“The Holocaust”). They were forced to work from early morning till late night in back-breaking labor. They were allocated a mere piece of black bread, small piece of margarine, and a cup of “so-called” soup. Due to extreme hard works, inadequate warm clothing and starvation, out of 17,000 labors in the Kamionka forced-labor camp, only 35 survived the war. The small percentage of surviving ratio was almost similar in all labor camps (Aish.com Staff). After the liberation, many slave labors returned their homelands, but for others, especially for Soviet labors, misery continued even after 1945. Back home, they were suspected as German spies and many were detained in Stalinist camps. Also, majority of former labors in old ages suffered from the physical and psychological disorders due to the constant torture and sufferings in the past. German business and government that have mainly benefited from the forced-labor camps have denied any kind of responsibility towards former slave labors and their families (“Nazi Forced Labor”). 4. The Extermination Camps Between 1941 and 1945, for the 1st time in the human history, industrial plants were used to mass murder people. For the purpose of mass murdering Jews, the Nazi regime established exterminations camps, conducting the mass murder of over 3 million Jews, i.e., over 50% of total victims of the Holocaust. An overall six major extermination camps were established with the sole purpose of executing Jews all together. In some places, gypsies (Roma) and other minorities were also executed in the extermination camps. Chelmno was the 1st extermination camp to be set up in the early 1940s, where over 150,000 Jews were gassed to death (Vogelsang and Larsen). Further, in 1942, another three extermination camps, i.e., Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, were established under the Operation Reinhard. Over millions of people lost their lives in mass murdering operations in these camps. One of the largest and most popular concentration camps- Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek turned into extermination camps after 1942, killing further millions of Jews and war prisoners (Vogelsang and Larsen). In the early 1942, under the leadership of SS officer Rainhard Haydrich, the Nazi regime approved the Final Solution, a plan to transport and murder all total 12 million Jews from all over Europe. For the execution of the operation, latest 20th century technology, effective mass killing techniques, and cost-efficient engineering were adopted (“The Camps”). The SS forces were in command of the extermination camps. The ordinary security guards were generally Balts or Ukrainians, who were presented as brutal criminals or violent psychopaths. The application of gas chambers was the widely used method of killing in the extermination camps. In the closed gas chambers, victims were exposed to poisonous gas, like Zyclon A or B. Gassing trucks was another widely used method in which victims were suffocated till death by means of the exhaust fumes. Mass shooting was another method used for the mass murdering of Jews and other prisoners. Most of the victims in the extermination camps were initially sorted according to their gender and physical fitness. Old, disabled, women, and children were immediately executed in the camps, while physically fit men were forced to labor for certain period of time before killing them (Vogelsang and Larsen). As German forced didn’t count the number and all these killings were performed secretly under the name of resettlement, the exact number of killed prisoners is unknown. However, it is estimated that over 3 million Jews were killed in the extermination camps during the war (“The Camps”). 5. Conclusion Nazi camps are one of the black episodes of the war history. In the WWII, the Nazi regime established thousands of camps, differing in types and purposes, all over Europe. Concentration camps, labor camps, and extermination camps were the three major types of Nazi camps. In these camps, thousands of victims, including the Jews, war prisoners, political prisoners, so-called “asocial” groups, were constantly tortured and exposed to inhumane conditions. Forced-labor camps proved to be essential power houses for the major sectors, like agriculture and industrial plants, during the War for the Nazi Germany. The holocaust of Jews in extermination camps is one of the tragic moments in the history of mankind. Overall, Nazi camps, where thousands of victims were immensely tortured and killed, represents barbaric and brutal nature of Nazi ideology and its regime. Works Cited Aish.com Staff. “Slave Labor.” aish.com, 31 December 1969. Web. 16 May 2015. “Auschwitz.” PBS.org, 2005. Web. 16 May 2015. “Concentration Camps.” www.yadvashem.org (2014):1-3. Web. 16 May 2015. “Different types of camps.” The Holocaust, 2014. Web. 16 May 2015. Historiann. “New research on Nazi slave labor camps shocks even Holocaust scholars.” historiann.com, 2 March 2013. Web. 16 May 2015. Lepage, Jean-Denis. An Illustrated Dictionary of the Third Reich. The United States: McFarland Company Inc., 2014. Print. “Nazi Forced Labor-Background Information.” Forced Labor: 1939-1945, 2015. Web. 16 May 2015. “Slave Labor in Nazi Germany.” www.dpcamps.org, 2013. Web. 16 May 2015. Soumerai, Eve Nussbaum and Carol Schulz. Daily Life During the Holocaust. The United States: British Library Cataloguing, 1998. Print. “The Camps.” fcit.coedu.usf.edu, 2005. Web. 16 May 2015. “The Holocaust.” Jewis Virtual Library, 2015. Web. 16 May 2015. “The Killing Machine.” Holocaust: A Call to Conscience, 2009. Web. 16 May 2015. Vogelsang, Peter and Brian Larsen. “Camps.” Holocast Education, 2002. Web 16 May 2015. Read More