German Extermination Camps or Death Camps were designed and built by Nazi Germany during World War II (1939â€"45) to systematically kill millions, primarily by gassing, but also by execution and extreme work under starvation conditions.
The idea of mass extermination with the use of stationary facilities built exclusively for that purpose was a result of earlier Nazi experimentation with the chemically manufactured poison gas during the secretive Action T4 euthanasia programme against mental patients. It was adapted, expanded and applied to victims from many ethnic and national groups; the Jews however became the most numerous Nazi targets. This genocide of the Jewish people was the Third Reich's "Final Solution to the Jewish question". The Nazi attempts at Jewish genocide are now collectively known as the Holocaust.
Although not responsible for an extermination camp death count of millions like that the Nazis perpetrated, the fascist Ustaše forces of the Independent State of Croatia operated extermination camps culminating in a six figure death toll.
Background
The top secret Action T4 euthanasia programme was initiated by the SS in 1939 to exterminate "life unworthy of life" (in German: "Lebensunwertes Leben") a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to life. The experience gained led to creation of extermination camps. Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 the Jews along with other targeted groups were confined to new ghettos and interned in Nazi concentration camps. However, in 1941 the Nazis embarked on die Endlösung der Judenfrage (The Final Solution of the Jewish Question) by the systematic killing of Europe's Jews. This adoption of the Action T4 programme by Nazi leaders during the first half of 1941, was derived from the then accepted ideas of racial hygiene and racial science. The initial, formal killings of the Final Solution were undertaken by the SS Einsatzgruppen (Task Forces) death squads who followed the Wehrmacht during the Operation Barbarossa invasion of the USSR in June 1941.
When the Nazis began to establish separate camps specifically for mass extermination, this was not a coordinated strategy. That changed with the Wannsee Conference chaired by Reinhard Heydrich in January 1942 in which the principle was made clear that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. Responsibility for the logistics were to be executed by the administrator, Adolf Eichmann.
In 1942, the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler ordered the Lublin District SS- und Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik to build the first extermination camps during "The Final Solution" (1941â€"43), the operation to annihilate every Jew in the General Government (occupied Poland).
Definition
The Nazi perpetrators distinguished between extermination camps and concentration camps, although the terms extermination camp (Vernichtungslager) and death camp (Todeslager) are interchangeable, each referring to camps whose primary function was genocide. They weren't used for punishing crime or containing political prisoners, but for the systematic killing of the prisoners delivered there en masse by the Holocaust trains. The executioners did not expect the majority of prisoners taken to the Belzec, Sobibór or Treblinka extermination camps to survive more than a few hours beyond arrival. As early as September 1942, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, M.D., an SS physician, witnessed a gassing of prisoners, and in his diary wrote: "They don't call Auschwitz the camp of annihilation [das Lager der Vernichtung] for nothing!" The first extermination camps were under Globocnik's direct command and operated by SS Police battalions and Trawnikis â€" volunteers from Eastern Europe.
These differed from concentration camps, such as Dachau and Belsen, which were initially prison camps for people defined as socially or politically undesirable in Nazi society. The SS-Totenkopfverbände managed the Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau and Ravensbrück.
The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials, when Dieter Wisliceny (a deputy to Adolf Eichmann) was asked to name the extermination camps, and he identified Auschwitz and Majdanek as such. Then, when asked "How do you classify the camps Mauthausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald?" he replied, "They were normal concentration camps, from the point of view of the department of Eichmann."
Extermination camps are distinguished from the Arbeitslager (forced labor camps) established in German-occupied countries to use the prisoners, including prisoners of war, as slave labor. In most camps (excepting PoW camps for the non-Soviet soldiers and certain labor camps), the high death rates resulted from execution, starvation, disease, exhaustion, and physical brutality.
Death camps
In the early years of the Holocaust, the Jews were primarily sent to concentration camps, but from 1942 onwards they were mostly deported to the extermination camps. For political and logistical reasons, the most infamous extermination camps Nazi Germany built were in Occupied Poland, where most of the intended victims lived; Poland had the greatest European Jewish populace. On top of that, the camps outside of the Third Reich proper could be kept secret from the German civil populace.
Pure extermination camps
Operationally, there were two types of death camps. Initially, gas vans producing poisonous carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were developed in occupied Soviet Union and at the Chełmno extermination camp in occupied Poland, before being used elsewhere.
The camps at Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór were constructed during Operation Reinhard (October 1941 â€" November 1943), for the extermination of Poland's Jews. 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 were built in Treblinka and Belzec; Zyklon-B was used in Belzec.
Whereas the Auschwitz II (Auschwitzâ€"Birkenau) and Majdanek camps were parts of a labor camp complex, the Operation Reinhard camps and the CheÅ‚mno camp were exclusively for the quick extermination of many people (primarily Jews) within hours of their arrival. Some able-bodied prisoners delivered to the death camp were not immediately killed, but were forced into labor units (Sonderkommando) to work at the extermination process, removing corpses from the gas chambers and burning them. Because the extermination camps were physically small (only several hundred metres long and wide) and equipped with minimal housing and support installations, the Nazis deceived the prisoners upon their arrival, telling them that they were at a temporary transit stop, and soon would continue to an Arbeitslager (work camp) farther east.
Concentration and extermination camps
At the camps of Operation Reinhard including Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka trainloads of prisoners were destined for immediate death in gas chambers built for that purpose. The mass killing facilities were developed at the Majdanek concentration camp, and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau at about the same time. In most other camps prisoners were selected for slave labor first; they were kept alive on starvation rations and made available to work wherever the rulers required. Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Jasenovac were retrofitted with Zyklon-B gas chambers and crematoria as the time went on, remaining operational until war's end in 1945. The Maly Trostenets extermination camp in the USSR initially operated as a prison camp. It became an extermination camp later in the war with victims undergoing mass shootings. This was supplemented with exhaust fume gassing in a van from October 1943.
The Sajmište concentration camp operated by the Nazis in Yugoslavia had a gas van stationed for use from March to June 1942. Once the industrial killings were completed, the van was returned to Berlin. After a refit the van was then sent to Maly Trostinets for use at the camp there. The Janowska concentration camp near Lwow in occupied eastern Poland implemented a selection process. Some prisoners were assigned to work before death. Others were either transported to Belzec or victims of mass shootings on two slopes in the Piaski sand-hills behind the camp. The Warsaw concentration camp was a camp complex of the German concentration camps, possibly including an extermination camp located in German-occupied Warsaw. The various details regarding the camp are very controversial and remain subject of historical research and public debate.
Other means of extermination
With the support of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy on 10 April 1941 the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was established, and adopted parallel racial and political doctrines. Death camps were established by the fascist Ustaše government for contributing to the Nazi "final solution" to the "Jewish problem", the killing of Roma people, and the elimination of political opponents, but most significantly to achieve the destruction of the Serbian population of the NDH. The degree of cruelty with which the Serb population was persecuted by Ustaše men shocked even the Germans.
The Jadovno concentration camp was located in a secluded area about 20 kilometres (12 mi) from the town of Gospić. It held thousands of Serbs and Jews over a period of 122 days from May to August 1941. Prisoners were usually but by no means exclusively killed by being pushed into deep ravines located near the camp.
The Jasenovac concentration camp complex of five sub-camps replaced Jadovno. Many inmates arriving at Jasenovac were scheduled for systematic extermination. An important criterion for selection was the duration of a prisoner's anticipated detention. Strong men capable of labour and sentenced to less than three years of incarceration were allowed to live. All inmates with indeterminate sentences or sentences of three years or more were immediately scheduled for execution, regardless of their fitness. Some of the mass executions were mechanical following Nazi methodology. Others were performed manually utilising tools such as mallets and agricultural knives and often in conjunction with throwing the victims off the end of a ramp into the River Sava.
Robert Conquest argues that the regime in labour camps in the Soviet Union, principally those in Siberia, was designed to bring about the death of prisoners after extracting 3â€"6 months' labour from them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concurs with him.
Extermination procedure
Heinrich Himmler visited the outskirts of Minsk in 1941 to witness mass shooting. He was told by the commanding officer there that the shootings were proving psychologically damaging to those being asked to pull the triggers. Thus Himmler knew another method of mass killing was required. After the war, the diary of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss, revealed that psychologically "unable to endure wading through blood any longer", many Einsatzkommandos â€" the killers â€" either went mad or killed themselves.
The Nazis had first used gassing with carbon monoxide cylinders to kill 70,000 disabled people in Germany in what they called a 'euthanasia programme' to disguise that mass murder was taking place. Despite the lethal effects of carbon monoxide, this was seen as unsuitable for use in the East due to the cost of transporting the carbon monoxide in cylinders.
Each extermination camp operated differently, yet each had designs for quick and efficient industrialized killing. While Höss was away on an official journey in late August 1941 his deputy, Karl Fritzsch, tested out an idea. At Auschwitz clothes infected with lice were treated with crystallised prussic acid. The crystals were made to order by the IG Farben chemicals company for which the brand name was Zyklon-B. Once released from their container, Zyklon-B crystals in the air released a lethal cyanide gas. Fritzch tried out the effect of Zyklon B on Soviet POWs, who were locked up in cells in the basement of the bunker for this experiment. Höss on his return was briefed and impressed with the results and this became the camp strategy for extermination as it was also to be at Majdanek. Besides gassing, the camp guards continued killing prisoners via mass shooting, starvation, torture, etc.
Gassings
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 camp (which was equipped with carbon monoxide gas chambers) and was shown the unloading of 45 train cars filled with 6,700 Jews, many already dead, but the rest were marched naked to the gas chambers, where:
Unterscharführer Hackenholt was making great efforts to get the engine running. But it doesn't go. Captain Wirth comes up. I can see he is afraid, because I am present at a disaster. Yes, I see it all and I wait. My stopwatch showed it all, 50 minutes, 70 minutes, and the diesel [engine] did not start. The people wait inside the gas chambers. In vain. They can be heard weeping, "like in the synagogue", says Professor Pfannenstiel, his eyes glued to a window in the wooden door. Furious, Captain Wirth lashes the Ukrainian [prisoner] assisting Hackenholt twelve, thirteen times, in the face. After 2 hours and 49 minutes â€" the stopwatch recorded it all â€" the diesel started. Up to that moment, the people shut up in those four crowded chambers were still alive, four times 750 persons, in four times 45 cubic meters. Another 25 minutes elapsed. Many were already dead, that could be seen through the small window, because an electric lamp inside lit up the chamber for a few moments. After 28 minutes, only a few were still alive. Finally, after 32 minutes, all were dead ... Dentists [then] hammered out gold teeth, bridges, and crowns. In the midst of them stood Captain Wirth. He was in his element, and, showing me a large can full of teeth, he said: "See, for yourself, the weight of that gold! It's only from yesterday, and the day before. You can't imagine what we find every day â€" dollars, diamonds, gold. You'll see for yourself!" â€" Kurt Gerstein
Auschwitz Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss reported that the first time Zyklon B gas was used on the Jews, many suspected they were to be killed â€" despite having been deceived into believing they were to be deloused and then returned to the camp. As a result, the Nazis identified and isolated "difficult individuals" who might alert the prisoners, and removed them from the mass â€" lest they incite revolt among the deceived majority of prisoners en route to the gas chambers. The "difficult" prisoners were led to a site out of view to be killed off discreetly.
A prisoner Sonderkommando (Special Detachment) effected the most of the processes of extermination; they accompanied the Jews into the gas chamber (a chamber room, usually outfitted to appear as a large shower room, with (nonworking) water nozzles, tile walls, etc.) and remained with them until just before the chamber door closed. To psychologically maintain the "calming effect" of the delousing deception, an SS guard stood at the door, as if awaiting the prisoners. The Sonderkommando hurried them to undress and enter the "shower room" as quickly as possible; to that effect, they also assisted the aged and the very young in undressing.
To further persuade the prisoners that nothing harmful was happening, the Sonderkommando deceived them with small talk about camp life. Fearing that the delousing "disinfectant" might harm their children, many mothers hid their infants beneath their piled clothes. Camp Commandant Höss reported that the "men of the Special Detachment were particularly on the look-out for this", and encouraged the women to take their children into the "shower room". Likewise, the Sonderkommando comforted older children who might cry "because of the strangeness of being undressed in this fashion".
Yet, not every prisoner was deceived by such psychological warfare tactics; Commandant Höss reported of Jews "who either guessed, or knew, what awaited them, nevertheless ... [they] found the courage to joke with the children, to encourage them, despite the mortal terror visible in their own eyes". Some women would suddenly "give the most terrible shrieks while undressing, or tear their hair, or scream like maniacs"; the Sonderkommando immediately took them away for execution by shooting. In such circumstances, others, meaning to save themselves at the gas chamber's threshold, betrayed the identities and "revealed the addresses of those members of their race still in hiding".
Once the door of the filled gas chamber was sealed, pellets of Zyklon B were dropped through special holes in the roof. Nazi regulations required that the Camp Commandant supervise the preparations, the gassing (through a peephole), and the aftermath looting of the corpses. Commandant Höss reported that the gassed victims "showed no signs of convulsion"; the Auschwitz camp physicians attributed that to the "paralyzing effect on the lungs" of the Zyklon-B gas, which killed before the victim began suffering convulsions.
As a matter of political training, some high-ranked Nazi Party leaders and SS officers were sent to Auschwitzâ€"Birkenau to witness the gassings; Höss reported that "all were deeply impressed by what they saw ... [yet some] ... who had previously spoken most loudly, about the necessity for this extermination, fell silent once they had actually seen the 'final solution of the Jewish problem'." As the Auschwitz Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss justified the extermination by explaining the need for "the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler's orders"; yet saw that even "[Adolf] Eichmann, who certainly [was] tough enough, had no wish to change places with me."
Corpse disposal
After the gassings, the Sonderkommando removed the corpses from the gas chamber, then extracted any gold teeth. Initially, the victims' corpses were buried in mass graves, but were later cremated.
To minimize the distinct smell of burning human hair the corpses were shaved before delivery to the crematoria or to the fire pits (thus maintaining secret the existence of the extermination camp). The Sonderkommando were responsible for burning the corpses, and stoking the fires, draining body fat, and turning over the "mountain of burning corpses" for even combustion and a peak fire-temperature. Commandant Höss was impressed by the diligence of the Sonderkommando prisoners, despite their being "well aware that ... they, too, would meet exactly the same fate", yet always doing their jobs "in such a matter-of-course manner that they might, themselves, have been the exterminators". Höss further reported that the men ate and smoked "even when engaged in the grisly job of burning corpses", in the course of which they occasionally encountered the corpse of a relative, but, although they "were obviously affected by this ... it never led to any incident" of revolt, as in the case of a Sonderkommando who so encountered the corpse of his wife, yet behaved "as though nothing had happened".
The corpses were incinerated in crematoria and the ashes either buried or scattered; yet, at Sobibór, Treblinka, Belzec, and Chełmno, 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 to handle the disposals around the clock, day and night.
Ustaše camps
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. presently estimates that the Ustaša regime in Croatia murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people at their own Jasenovac concentration camp between 1941 and 1945. The Jasenovac Memorial Site quotes a similar figure of between 80,000 and 100,000 victims. The television documentary, "Nazi Collaborators" on Dinko Sakic stated that over 300,000 people were killed at Jasenovac. The Jasenovac mechanical means of mass killing included the use initially of gas vans and later Zyklon B in stationary gas chambers. The Jasenovac guards have also been reported to have cremated living inmates in the crematorium. A notable difference of the Ustaše camps as compared to the German SS camps was the widespread use of manual methods in the mass killings. These involved instruments such as mallets and agricultural knives which evolved to often to be done in a manner where still alive victims were thrown off the end of a ramp into the River Sava.
The estimates for the Jadovno concentration camp generally offer a range of 10,000 â€" 72,000 deaths at the camp over a period of 122 days (May to August 1941). Most commonly Jadovno victims were bound together in a line and the first few victims were murdered with rifle butts or other objects. Afterwards, an entire row of inmates were pushed into the ravine. Hand grenades were hurled inside in order to finish off the victims. Dogs would also be thrown in to feed on the wounded and the dead. Inmates were also killed by machine gunfire, as well as with knives and blunt objects.
Death toll
The estimated total number of people executed in the Nazi camps in the table below is over three million:
Dismantlement and attempted concealment
The Nazis attempted to either partly or completely dismantle the extermination camps in order to hide any evidence that people had been murdered. This was an attempt to conceal not only the extermination process but also the buried remains. As a result of the secretive Sonderaktion 1005, camps were dismantled by commandos of condemned prisoners, records destroyed, and mass graves were dug up. Some extermination camps that remained uncleared of evidence were liberated by Soviet troops, who had different standards of documentation and openness than the Western allies.
The notable exception in this is Majdanek. Majdanek was ordered to share a similar fate to the other camps by the Nazi leadership in their attempt to cover up the murderous events. Majdanek though was captured nearly intact. This was due to the rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration preventing the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure. Commandant Anton Thernes ineptly failed in his task of removing incriminating evidence of war crimes.
Commemoration
In the post-war period the government of the People's Republic of Poland created monuments at the extermination camp sites. These early monuments mentioned no ethnic, religious, or national particulars of the Nazi victims. The extermination camps sites have been accessible to everyone in recent decades. They are popular destinations for visitors from all over the world, especially the most-infamous Nazi death camp, Auschwitz near the town of Oświęcim. In the early 1990s, the Jewish Holocaust organisations debated with the Polish Catholic groups about "What religious symbols of martyrdom are appropriate as memorials in a Nazi death camp such as Auschwitz?" The Jews opposed the placement of Christian memorials such as the Auschwitz cross near Auschwitz I where mostly Poles were killed. The Jewish victims of the Holocaust were mostly killed at Auschwitz II Birkenau.
The March of the Living is organized in Poland annually since 1988. Marchers come from countries as diverse as Estonia, New Zealand, Panama, and Turkey.
The camps and Holocaust denial
Holocaust deniers are people and organisations who assert that the Holocaust did not occur, or that it did not occur in the historically recognized manner and extent.
Extermination camp research is difficult because of extensive attempts by the SS and Nazi regime to conceal the existence of the extermination camps. The existence of the extermination camps is firmly established by testimonies of camp survivors and Final Solution perpetrators, material evidence (the remaining camps, etc.), Nazi photographs and films of the killings, and camp administration records.
Holocaust deniers often start by pointing out legitimate public misconceptions about the extermination camps. For example, widely published images in America were mostly of typhoid victims and Soviet POWs at the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps â€" the first to be liberated by American troops and the most available imagery in America. In early news reports and for years afterwards these images were often used by the news media somewhat inaccurately in conjunction with descriptions of extermination camps and Jewish suffering. Holocaust deniers, after pointing out such common errors, put it forward as evidence that extermination camps did not exist and the limited evidence about them is mostly a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy.
Holocaust denial is highly discredited by scholars and is a criminal offence in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland.
See also
- German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
- Soap made from human corpses
- World War II crimes in Poland
Notes
References
- Bartov, Omer (ed.). The Holocaust: origins, implementation, aftermath. London: Routledge, 2000 ISBN 0-415-15035-3
- Gilbert, Martin. Holocaust Journey: travelling in search of the past, Phoenix, 1997. An account of the sites of the extermination camps as they are today, plus historical information about them and about the fate of the Jews of Poland.
- Höss, Rudolf (1959). Commandant of Auschwitz. The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess with an Introduction by Lord Russett (PDF FILE SIZE: 16.7 MB FROM SCRIBD). Translated from the German by Constantine FitzGibbon. The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York. pp. 1â€"311. Retrieved 15 January 2015.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-5808.
 - Klee, Ernst. "'Turning the tap on was no big deal': the gassing doctors during the Nazi period and afterwards," in Dachau Review, vol. 2, 1990.
- Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. London: Michael Joseph, 1986 ISBN 0-7181-3063-4
- Cox, John K. (2007). "Ante Pavelić and the UstaÅ¡a State in Croatia". In Fischer, Bernd Jürgen. Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of South Eastern Europe. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press. ISBN 978-1-55753-455-2.Â
External links
- The Implementation of the Final Solution: The Death Camps on the Yad Vashem website
- The Holocaust History Project
- Holocaust and concentration camps information
- The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
- Official U.S. National Archive Footage of Nazi camps
- Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard.