The Camp System

Why this Chapter exists

A camp was not a single kind of place.

The term “concentration camp” is often used for the whole Nazi camp system, with Auschwitz as the most familiar example. Historians use more precise terms. The Nazi regime ran several distinct types of camps. They had different purposes, different prisoner populations, and different death rates. They also played different parts in the wider machinery of the genocide. The most important distinction is between a concentration camp and a killing center. Concentration camps were places of imprisonment, brutality, and forced labor, where prisoners died in great numbers from starvation, disease, beatings, and executions. Killing centers were built to murder entire populations on arrival. Knowing the differences makes the documents, the testimony, and the photographs easier to read.

The main scholarly reference for the camp system as a whole is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. This multi-volume project has so far identified more than 44,000 individual sites across occupied Europe. The sites include concentration camps, forced-labor camps, transit camps, and ghettos. They also include prisoner-of-war camps with substantial Jewish populations, and other categories.

The categories of camps

Five types, briefly distinguished.

Historians distinguish five main categories of Nazi camps. The lines between them are not absolute. Some sites combined more than one function over time. But the categories capture how the system was built.

• Concentration camps: places of imprisonment, forced labor, and systematic brutality. The original Nazi camp system, beginning at Dachau in March 1933. Prisoners included political opponents of the regime, people labeled racially or socially “undesirable,” and, from the late 1930s, growing numbers of Jewish prisoners. Death rates were high. But these camps were not designed to murder people on arrival.
• Killing centers (extermination camps): built for the systematic murder of people on arrival, primarily by gas. Six killing centers operated, all on Polish territory under German rule, four in the General Government and two in areas annexed to the Reich: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. The killing centers are where the largest share of the Holocaust’s murders took place.
• Forced-labor camps: camps where Jewish and other prisoners were forced to work for German industry, agriculture, the military, and construction. The largest single category in the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, thousands of sites of every size across occupied Europe.
• Transit camps: holding camps for people awaiting deportation, usually to the killing centers. The major ones, Westerbork, Drancy, Mechelen, and Theresienstadt, are described below.
• Prisoner-of-war camps. A distinct category. Soviet prisoners of war were held under murderous conditions. About 3.3 million of them, some 57 percent of those captured, were dead by the end of the war. The Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention, and German officials used that to excuse the treatment. Jewish soldiers among the Soviet prisoners were singled out and shot, and their fate is part of the record of the genocide.

Concentration camps

The original Nazi camp system, 1933–1945.

The Nazi concentration-camp system took lasting shape on March 22, 1933, with the opening of Dachau near Munich, the first camp under SS control. That was less than two months after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Dozens of improvised camps run by the police and by the SA, the Nazi Party’s storm troopers, had opened in the same weeks. They were later closed or absorbed into the SS system. The SS set up Dachau under Heinrich Himmler, who would soon become the chief architect of the whole camp system. Dachau’s first purpose was imprisoning the regime’s political opponents: communists, social democrats, trade unionists, and others. Its design became the model for the system that grew from it.

Across 1933–1939, the SS built the main pre-war concentration camps. Sachsenhausen opened in 1936 near Berlin, and Buchenwald in 1937 near Weimar. Flossenbürg followed in 1938, Mauthausen in August 1938 in annexed Austria, and Ravensbrück, the camp for women, in 1939. In these years the prisoners were mostly political prisoners, along with people the regime labeled repeat criminals under its expanded rules. Others were targeted on racial or social grounds: Roma and Sinti, people the regime labeled “asocial,” gay men under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others. Jewish prisoners were a smaller part of the pre-war camp population. The major exception came after Kristallnacht, the regime’s nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938. Some 26,000 to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

After September 1939, the war changed the camp system’s scale and purpose. New camps went up across occupied Europe. Among them: Stutthof near Danzig (September 1939), Auschwitz I (May 1940), Gross-Rosen (1940), Natzweiler-Struthof in annexed Alsace (1941), and many others. The prisoner population grew too. It now included Polish political prisoners and intellectuals, Soviet prisoners of war held under the deadly conditions noted above, and Jewish prisoners from the occupied territories. It also included people across the conquered countries targeted as racial or political enemies. By 1944, the concentration-camp system included more than twenty principal camps and over a thousand subcamps.

Death rates in the concentration camps varied across camps, periods, and prisoner categories. Conditions at Mauthausen and its subcamps were exceptionally severe, and so were those at Gross-Rosen and certain subcamps of Buchenwald. Prisoners forced to work in the Mauthausen quarry were quickly worked to death, and at least 95,000 of the roughly 197,000 prisoners who passed through the Mauthausen camp system died there. The concentration camps were not built to murder prisoners on arrival, but the SS killed there too. Prisoners were executed in the camps, and between 1941 and 1943 the SS sent an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners judged unfit for work to be gassed at the T-4 killing centers under Operation 14f13 (Unit 4 · Ch. 02 · Aktion T-4). More were gassed in 1944.

The six killing centers

The dedicated facilities of the Final Solution, the Nazi program to murder all of Europe’s Jews.

The killing centers were the principal sites of systematic mass murder during the Holocaust. They are the places where the greatest number of Jews were murdered. All six stood on Polish territory under German rule. They ran under different structures. Three ran under Operation Reinhard: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Operation Reinhard was the code name for the plan to murder the roughly two million Jews of the General Government, the German-run zone of occupied Poland. One, Chełmno, was run by an SS special detachment under the Nazi governor of the annexed Wartheland, outside both structures. Two, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, combined killing-center and concentration-camp functions in one place. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) estimates that about 2.7 million Jews were murdered at the killing centers. More than 100,000 Roma, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others were murdered there as well, most of them at Auschwitz.

Chełmno · December 1941 – April 1943, reactivated June 1944 – January 1945

The first dedicated killing center.

The killing center at Chełmno (German: Kulmhof) opened on December 8, 1941, at a former manor estate about 65 kilometers northwest of Łódź in German-occupied Poland. It was the first stationary site where the Nazis used poison gas for the mass murder of Jews.

The killing method at Chełmno was the gas van, a sealed truck into which the exhaust was channeled. Victims were brought to the manor house and told they would be processed for resettlement. They were then loaded into the gas vans in groups of about 50 to 70 people. The vans drove to a nearby forest, and the killing took place during the drive. The bodies were buried. Beginning in 1942, they were dug up and burned to destroy the evidence.

Chełmno operated in two phases. The first phase, December 1941 to April 1943, was the main period of operation, and the overwhelming majority of the victims were murdered then. Most came from the Łódź Ghetto and the surrounding region of the Wartheland, the part of western Poland Germany had annexed. The second phase began in June 1944, during the final liquidation of the Łódź Ghetto. Thousands more people were murdered. In all, at least 156,300 people were murdered at Chełmno, among them at least 152,000 Jews and about 4,300 Roma. In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached, the SS shot nearly all of the camp’s last Jewish prisoners and abandoned the camp. Some of the prisoners fought back, and two of them survived.

Seven Jewish men are known to have escaped Chełmno. At least three survived the war, among them Mordechai Podchlebnik and Szymon Srebrnik. Their testimony is among the earliest direct survivor accounts of the killing-center system. Srebrnik’s testimony is preserved on film in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Both survivors testified at postwar trials. The site at Chełmno is preserved as the Chełmno Museum.

Bełżec · March 1942 – December 1942

The first Operation Reinhard killing center.

The killing center at Bełżec opened on March 17, 1942, in the Lublin district of the General Government (German-occupied Poland). It was the first of the three killing centers built under Operation Reinhard. The operation is generally understood to have been named after Reinhard Heydrich, the SS officer who had convened the Wannsee Conference, the January 1942 meeting that coordinated the murder program across the German government. Heydrich was attacked in May 1942 by Czechoslovak soldiers who had been trained in Britain and parachuted home for the mission. He died of his wounds in June.

The killing method at Bełżec was carbon-monoxide gas chambers. The gas was produced by engine exhaust and pumped into sealed chambers. Victims were brought by train from the Jewish communities of the General Government, primarily from Lwów (Lviv), Lublin, Kraków, and the surrounding regions. They were murdered on arrival, usually within hours of the train reaching the camp.

Bełżec operated for about nine months. At least 434,508 people were murdered there in those months, by the SS’s own count, nearly all of them Jews. That count comes from a single document from the time, the Höfle Telegram, a January 1943 radiogram reporting the Operation Reinhard figures camp by camp (see the Object Spotlight).

Two prisoners are known to have survived Bełżec and spoken about it after the war. Chaim Hirszman was murdered in Lublin in March 1946. Rudolf Reder testified at postwar trials. The site at Bełżec is preserved as the Bełżec Museum.

Sobibór · May 1942 – October 1943

The killing center that ended in revolt.

The killing center at Sobibór opened in May 1942 in the Lublin district. The killing method was carbon-monoxide gas chambers, parallel to Bełżec. Sobibór received transports primarily from the General Government, from the Netherlands (the Westerbork transit camp), from France (via Drancy), and from other Western European countries. At least 167,000 people were murdered at Sobibór, the overwhelming majority Jewish.

Sobibór stands out for the revolt of October 14, 1943. About 600 prisoners remained in the camp, and a resistance group among them organized an armed uprising. It was led by Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, a Soviet Jewish prisoner of war who had arrived that September. He worked with the Polish Jewish prisoner Leon Feldhendler. The prisoners killed eleven members of the German staff and several guards, and some 300 prisoners escaped. Some 50 of them survived the war.

The revolt ended the camp. The SS shot the prisoners who had not escaped, tore down the buildings, and closed the camp in November 1943. Trees were planted over the buried evidence to hide what the site had been. The site at Sobibór is preserved as the Sobibór Museum, where archaeologists have recovered much of the site since the 2000s.

Treblinka · July 1942 – November 1943

The killing center that murdered the Warsaw Ghetto.

The killing center at Treblinka opened on July 23, 1942, in the General Government, about 80 kilometers northeast of Warsaw. Its precise name is Treblinka II. The name separates the killing center from the forced-labor camp next to it, Treblinka I. The labor camp opened in November 1941 and ran until late July 1944. As Soviet troops approached, the guards shot the several hundred Jewish prisoners still held there. The killing method was carbon-monoxide gas chambers.

Treblinka was the principal killing center for the Jewish community of Warsaw. The deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka began on July 22, 1942, and continued through September 1942, the “Great Deportation.” About 265,000 of the ghetto’s inhabitants were deported and murdered. Starvation and disease had already brought the population down from its peak of over 400,000. The systematic murder of the Warsaw Jewish community at Treblinka is documented in survivor testimony, in postwar trial records, and in the Ringelblum Archive, the secret archive the historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his circle buried inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

The USHMM estimates that about 925,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka, the second-largest killing-center death toll after Auschwitz-Birkenau. An undetermined number of Roma and Poles were also murdered there. On August 2, 1943, two months before the Sobibór revolt, the prisoners rose up. More than 300 escaped. Most were hunted down. Some 70 are known to have survived the war. After the uprising, the Nazi authorities tore down the camp and worked to hide what had happened there. Jewish prisoners had already been forced to dig up the mass graves and burn the bodies. The grounds were then planted with lupines, a field flower, and a farmer was settled on the land so that it would look like an ordinary farm. The site is preserved as the Treblinka Museum, with a substantial postwar memorial designed by Adam Haupt and Franciszek Duszeńko.

Majdanek · October 1941 – July 1944

The composite camp on the edge of Lublin.

Majdanek (formally KL Lublin) was a case of its own. It ran at the same time as a concentration camp, a forced-labor camp, a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in its earliest phase, and a killing center. The camp was established in October 1941 on the southeastern outskirts of Lublin in German-occupied Poland. Mass murder with poison gas began there in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943. On November 3, 1943, in the shooting operation called Aktion Erntefest (“Operation Harvest Festival”), SS and police shot some 18,000 Jews just outside the camp in a single day.

Majdanek stood apart in two more ways. First, it sat at the edge of a major Polish city rather than in a remote place. It also left a larger body of documentation from the time than the isolated Operation Reinhard sites. Second, Majdanek was the first major killing center to be liberated by Allied forces. Soviet forces overran the camp during the night of July 22–23, 1944, and captured the gas chambers intact. The SS had set fire to the crematorium the day before they withdrew. What Soviet forces found there became the first photographic and documentary evidence of the killing-center system to reach the world’s press.

Scholars estimate that some 80,000 people were murdered at Majdanek. About 60,000 of them were Jewish. The site is preserved as the Majdanek State Museum, with the original gas chambers, crematorium, and substantial parts of the camp infrastructure intact.

Auschwitz-Birkenau · May 1940 – January 1945

The largest of the killing centers.

Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi camps. It was really a complex: three main camps and almost 50 subcamps spread across the Silesian region of annexed Poland. The three main camps:

• Auschwitz I (Stammlager): the original camp, established on May 20, 1940, in the former Polish military barracks at Oświęcim. It functioned as the administrative center of the complex and as a concentration camp for political prisoners, at first mostly Polish. After the killing operations began, it too became a site of mass murder. Holds the Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”) gate.
• Auschwitz II–Birkenau: the main killing center, established in October 1941 about three kilometers from Auschwitz I, in the village of Brzezinka. Birkenau held the main gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz: four major complexes (Crematoria II, III, IV, and V). It also held the railhead where incoming transports were processed and the selections made: the sorting of arrivals between forced labor and the gas chambers.
• Auschwitz III–Monowitz: established in October 1942 as the Buna labor camp for the IG Farben synthetic-rubber plant. It became the main forced-labor part of the complex. Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist and writer, was imprisoned at Monowitz. His memoir If This Is a Man is among the most influential survivor accounts.

The gas used in the Birkenau chambers was Zyklon B, a prewar pesticide. Its pellets gave off hydrogen cyanide gas once they were exposed to air. The SS first used it on people on September 3, 1941, at Auschwitz I: about 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Polish prisoners were murdered. At Birkenau, the people chosen for death at the ramp were told they were going to be disinfected, then locked into the gas chamber. The work that followed fell to the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoria. They dragged out the bodies, cut the women’s hair, removed metal dental work and jewelry, and burned the dead in the furnaces or in open pits. Every few months the SS killed the squad and chose a new one from the arriving transports. On October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando rose against the SS and destroyed Crematorium IV, a revolt told in Unit 4 · Ch. 07 · Jewish Resistance & Rescue.

The total number of people murdered at Auschwitz is about 1.1 million. The figure was established by Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Auschwitz: How Many Perished, Jews, Poles, Gypsies (1994). Of those, some 1.0 million were Jewish. The rest were roughly 70,000–75,000 Poles, about 21,000 Roma and Sinti, more than 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and roughly 10,000–15,000 prisoners of other nationalities and categories.

The killing at Auschwitz-Birkenau reached its peak in spring and summer 1944, with the deportation of the Hungarian Jewish community. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, about 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported on 147 trains, about 420,000 of them to Auschwitz. Some 330,000 were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. The Hungarian deportations were the most concentrated killing operation in the history of Auschwitz.

Birkenau also held a separate section for Sinti and Roma (the Sinti are a subgroup of the Roma), opened in February 1943. The SS called it the Zigeunerfamilienlager, the “Gypsy family camp,” using a label the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes as pejorative. Whole families lived there together. Ceija Stojka, a girl from a family of Lowara Roma horse traders in Austria, was deported there with her family and was freed at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. About 23,000 Sinti and Roma were deported to Auschwitz, and about 21,000 of them were murdered there. On the night of August 2–3, 1944, the SS murdered the camp’s last prisoners in the gas chambers, between 4,200 and 4,300 children, women, and men. In 2015 the European Parliament called for August 2 to be marked as European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Auschwitz complex was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945. The site is preserved as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial and Museum, the largest Holocaust memorial site in the world. The complex was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979.

Greece · March 1943 – August 1944

The Sephardic communities of Salonika and Rhodes.

The transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Greece as well. Salonika (today Thessaloniki), a port in northern Greece, held the largest Jewish community in the country. Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, had settled there under Ottoman rule. Most of their descendants still spoke Ladino at home, a Judeo-Spanish language that grew from the Spanish their ancestors carried east. By the early 1900s so many Jews worked the docks that the port fell quiet on the Sabbath. About half of the city’s newspapers were printed in Ladino.

In February 1943, the Germans forced the city’s Jews into two ghettos. From March to August, they deported more than 45,000 of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most were gassed on arrival. Those chosen for forced labor spoke Ladino, Greek, and French. The common languages of the camp were German, Yiddish, and Polish, so many could barely talk with the prisoners around them.

Jewish life on Rhodes, an Aegean island that Italy had ruled since 1912 and that is today part of Greece, centered on the Juderia, the Jewish quarter of the medieval old city. In September 1943 the Germans took the island from Italy. In late July 1944, they rounded up the Jews of Rhodes and the nearby island of Kos and shipped them by way of Athens to Auschwitz. About 1,800 people were deported, and fewer than 200 survived. Selahattin Ülkümen, the consul general of neutral Turkey on Rhodes, won the release of Jews with Turkish citizenship or close Turkish ties. Yad Vashem credits him with saving about 50 people. In 1989 it recognized him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, its title for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.

What was taken

The belongings of the murdered.

The deportees had been told they were being resettled in the East, so they packed for a new life. They were allowed 30 to 50 kilograms of luggage. Tailors brought sewing machines, doctors brought their instruments, and shoemakers brought their tools. At the killing centers, the people sent to the gas chambers had to undress and leave it all behind: clothes, shoes, suitcases, and whatever valuables they still had.

At Auschwitz, prisoners were forced to haul the belongings from the arrival ramp to warehouses. By 1944, some 1,500 to 2,000 other prisoners worked there. They combed the belongings for hidden gold and other valuables, cleaned the shoes and paired them, and removed the Stars of David and other marks that showed who the owners had been. The prisoners called the warehouses “Kanada,” probably because before the war Canada stood for wealth and plenty. Jewish women sorting the clothes sometimes found the clothing of their own families. Forced laborers at the other killing centers did the same work, and at all of them except Chełmno they also had to shave the victims’ heads. At Auschwitz the hair was packed, weighed, and labeled for shipment out of the camp.

Their homes were taken as well. In Germany, a decree of November 25, 1941, declared that the property of Jews who moved their residence abroad belonged to the German state. Deportation was treated as such a move. Their furniture and household goods were often auctioned off in public, in front of the houses they came from. In occupied France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the Nazis carried out the Möbel-Aktion, German for “Furniture Operation.” It emptied 69,619 Jewish homes, 38,000 of them in Paris alone. It took 26,984 railroad cars to carry the furnishings to Germany.

From the camps, valuables went to the SS and on to the Reichsbank, Germany’s central bank. Clothing and other goods were disinfected and sent by train to Germany, to German organizations, industry, and civilians. The liberators found in the warehouses what the SS had not shipped before abandoning the camp in January 1945. Some of it is displayed today at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. The long effort to return what was taken, and to pay for what could not be returned, is the subject of Unit 6 · Ch. 04 · Postwar Restitution.

Forced-labor camps

The largest single category of camps.

The forced-labor camps fell into four kinds, depending on who ran them:

• SS-administered forced-labor camps: labor camps directly under the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (SS-WVHA), often as subcamps of the major concentration camps. The WVHA had absorbed the camp inspectorate in March 1942 and turned the whole system toward war production.
• Wehrmacht-administered camps: labor camps under German military administration, particularly in the early war years.
• Civil-administration camps: labor camps under German civilian bodies, including the Organisation Todt, which ran major military and construction projects.
• Industry-administered camps: labor camps for civilian forced workers run by German firms themselves (IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, and many others). Camps at company plants that held concentration-camp prisoners remained SS installations, and the SS leased the labor to the firm.

Death rates varied widely. Camps doing heavy construction, or working with dangerous materials, killed at high rates. Dora-Mittelbau at Nordhausen, where prisoners produced the V-2 rocket, was among the deadliest. So were the Dora-Ellrich subcamp and many of the Mauthausen subcamps. Other camps kept more of their prisoners alive, on the logic that the work required it.

The labor system and the killing system worked together. At Auschwitz-Birkenau and at Majdanek, prisoners judged fit for work at the arrival selection were sent to labor within the complex or to subcamps. Prisoners judged unfit were murdered on arrival. The two systems were distinct, but tightly linked. A prisoner selected for work could still die later, from starvation, disease, execution, or transfer to a killing center.

The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos project has identified some 30,000 forced-labor camp sites, including subcamps of all sizes. Individual camp histories are documented in varying detail in the scholarly literature.

Across Europe

The transports and the governments that helped.

The trains came from almost every country Germany ruled or allied with, and moving millions of people took an administration. In Berlin, the Reich Security Main Office directed the deportations through its Jewish affairs office, Department IV B 4, under SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. The Transport Ministry drew up the train schedules, and German railroad officials supplied the cars. The Foreign Office negotiated with Germany’s allies for the handover of their Jewish citizens. On the ground, the Order Police, local police, and local auxiliaries carried out the roundups, working from registers of Jews. In the Netherlands, the German authorities had ordered every Jew to register in January 1941.

In Western Europe, the deportees were first gathered in transit camps and held there, usually for days or weeks, before the trains left eastward. The major transit camps:

• Westerbork (Netherlands): the principal transit camp for the deportation of the Dutch Jewish community. The Dutch government had built Westerbork in 1939 as a camp for Jewish refugees from Germany. The German occupation turned it into a transit camp in 1942. Roughly 107,000 of the Netherlands’ 140,000 Jews were deported, most of them through Westerbork, primarily to Auschwitz and Sobibór. About 5,200 of them survived. Anne Frank and her family were deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944.
• Drancy (France): the principal French transit camp, in a suburb of Paris. French police staffed the camp until July 1943, when the SS took direct control. About 65,000 French Jews and Jews resident in France were deported through Drancy, the great majority to Auschwitz.
• Mechelen (Belgium): the principal Belgian transit camp, in the Mechelen Kazerne (military barracks). Some 25,000 Belgian Jews and Jews resident in Belgium were deported through Mechelen, primarily to Auschwitz.
• Theresienstadt (Terezín, in the German-run Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia): the distinctive case. Theresienstadt was officially a transit camp and “model ghetto.” The regime used it for elderly German and Austrian Jews, for decorated First World War veterans, and for prominent Jewish figures. It also served as a Nazi propaganda site. The regime staged it for international observers, most prominently the International Red Cross in June 1944, as proof of supposedly humane treatment. About 34,000 prisoners died at Theresienstadt itself. About 88,000 more were deported to other ghettos, camps, killing sites, and killing centers in German-occupied eastern Europe, Auschwitz among them. About 3,500 of them survived.
• Risiera di San Sabba (Italy): the only Nazi camp with a crematorium on Italian soil, in Trieste. Functioned as a transit camp and as a site of murder, particularly for Italian Jews and partisans.

The transit camps were where the deportations from Western Europe were organized on paper. Registration lists, transport records, and correspondence survive from them. Those records provide much of the primary-source material for documenting the Western European Jewish communities that did not survive.

In France, much of the work was French. Vichy France, the collaborating French government, passed the first Statut des Juifs (Statute on Jews) on October 3, 1940, shutting Jews out of public life. On July 16 and 17, 1942, French police arrested about 13,000 Jews in Paris. The families among them, more than 8,000 people including more than 4,000 children, were locked inside the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycling stadium, for days. They were then moved to camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, where some 3,000 children were separated from their parents. Most of the families were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered. In all, about 76,000 Jews were deported from France, 11,000 of them children, most to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and about 2,500 of them survived. The names of the deported fill the Wall of Names at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris (Unit 6 · Ch. 05 · The Memory Architecture).

Fascist Italy passed antisemitic laws from 1938 but did not hand its Jews over. Deportations began only after Germany occupied the north and center of the country in September 1943. On October 16, 1943, German police seized 1,259 Jews in Rome, and 1,023 of them were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sixteen came back. Slovakia agreed in March 1942 to the deportation of its Jews. Its own gendarmes and the Hlinka Guard, the ruling party’s militia, rounded them up, and between March and October 1942 the Germans deported about 57,000 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and other killing sites. Perhaps 300 survived. Croatia’s Ustaša regime, another German ally, ran camps of its own. At Jasenovac, the largest of them, it murdered between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, alongside some 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs and 15,000 to 20,000 Roma. More than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed in all, in Croatia or at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Romania’s own forces murdered Jews at Iaşi, Odessa, and Bogdanovka in Transnistria, a record told in Unit 4 · Ch. 05 · The Einsatzgruppen. Hungary’s turn came in 1944. After Germany occupied the country, Hungarian gendarmes working with Eichmann’s staff carried out the deportations of Hungary’s Jews from May 15 to July 9, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In the Netherlands, where most deportations ran through Westerbork, fewer than a quarter of the country’s Jews survived. The country’s geography made escape difficult, the German administration ran the deportations with ruthless efficiency, and Dutch administrators and police cooperated willingly. France had roughly 350,000 Jews, and about 76,000 of them were deported. Two thirds of the deported were not French citizens. Denmark went the other way, as told in Unit 4 · Ch. 07 · Jewish Resistance & Rescue. Bulgaria did not deport its own Jews. But in March 1943 it handed the Germans 11,343 Jews from the Greek and Yugoslav lands it occupied, and almost none survived.

The camps and the towns around them

How close the camps were to ordinary life.

The camps were not hidden away in secret wilderness. Many stood beside the towns and cities where people lived. Dachau sat at the edge of a Bavarian market town of the same name. Majdanek was built on the outskirts of Lublin, a city of more than 100,000, its watchtowers visible from the streets. Buchenwald overlooked Weimar, the city of Goethe and German high culture. Residents saw the columns of prisoners marched out to work, watched the transports come and go, and lived with the smoke and the smell from the crematoria.

The camps were part of the economy around them. The SS leased prisoner labor to German firms (among them IG Farben, Krupp, and Siemens, and hundreds of smaller companies) for a daily fee per prisoner. Local builders, suppliers, railway crews, and civil servants did business with the camps. The camps were run openly, by salaried officials, and recorded in ordinary paperwork.

The killing centers were the exception. The Reinhard camps and Chełmno were placed in remote locations and disguised as transit stations. Auschwitz and Majdanek, by contrast, stood beside inhabited towns. The goal was to conceal the murder itself, even where the deportations that fed them were public. How much surrounding populations knew, how that knowledge varied from place to place, and how individuals responded remain important questions in Holocaust scholarship.

The youngest victims

Children in the camp system.

Children occupied a specific place in how the camps worked. At the killing centers, the selection on the arrival ramp turned on a single question: could this person be put to work? SS physicians made that decision. Children (like the elderly, the sick, and pregnant women) almost always could not. They were sent straight to the gas chambers, unregistered, within hours of stepping off the train. Most of the roughly 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust were killed this way, or earlier, in the mass shootings and the ghettos. Of the more than 230,000 children and teenagers deported to Auschwitz, only a few hundred were alive when Soviet forces reached the camp in January 1945.

The Nazis also built camps specifically to hold children. The largest was the children’s camp at Litzmannstadt, the German name for Łódź. It opened in December 1942 in a fenced-off section carved out of the Łódź Ghetto. It held Polish children, most of them not Jewish: orphans, the children of arrested resistance members, and others taken off the streets, some as young as six. They were put to forced labor (weaving baskets, making straw shoes, sewing and repairing uniforms) on starvation rations. An unknown number died of hunger, disease, and beatings before the camp was liberated in January 1945. Inside Germany, the regime ran two youth concentration camps of its own, Moringen for boys and Uckermark for girls, for adolescents it labeled “asocial” or “criminal.” The prisoners there were examined, sorted by the regime’s racial rules, and worked.

A small number of children were kept alive for specific reasons. At Auschwitz, the SS doctor Josef Mengele selected twins and certain other children for medical experiments. Older teenagers were sometimes registered for forced labor. Theresienstadt was an exception of a different kind: the imprisoned adults, among them the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, organized secret lessons, concerts, and art classes for the children held there. By the traditional count, about 15,000 children passed through Theresienstadt and a few hundred of them survived. The figures are remembered rather than documented, and scholars treat them with care. Roughly 4,500 of their drawings, hidden and recovered after the war, are held today by the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The Nazi ghetto distinction

Not every ghetto was a camp.

The Nazi-era ghettos were sealed city districts, not camps, and they have their own Chapter. Unit 4 · Ch. 03 · The Nazi Ghettos follows Warsaw, Łódź, and the more than 1,300 ghettos that Germany and its allies set up, the Jewish councils, the uprisings, and the trains that emptied them into the killing centers. They share only a name with the early-modern European ghetto of Unit 3 · Ch. 03 · The Ghetto System, a lasting neighborhood that stood for centuries.

The final months

Evacuations, death marches, and liberation.

As the Soviet army advanced from the east through 1944, the SS began emptying the camps in its path rather than let the prisoners be freed. After Soviet forces captured Majdanek largely intact in July 1944, the SS drove the prisoners of the remaining camps westward, on foot and in open rail cars, through the winter of 1944–45.

These forced evacuations became known as the death marches. Prisoners already starved and worked to exhaustion were moved for days or weeks in the cold with little or no food. Those who fell behind or could not keep pace were shot at the roadside. The largest began in mid-January 1945, when about 56,000 prisoners were marched out of the Auschwitz complex days before Soviet troops arrived. The historian Daniel Blatman estimates that from January 1945, about 250,000 concentration-camp prisoners died on the death marches and in massacres along the way. Others died in the overcrowded camps they were driven into. Among those camps was Bergen-Belsen, which had no gas chambers and yet saw tens of thousands die of starvation and typhus in the final weeks.

Liberation came unevenly, camp by camp, as the front lines reached them. Soviet forces entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, finding about 7,000 prisoners too weak to be moved. That spring, American and British troops reached the camps inside the Reich (Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, Mauthausen in annexed Austria). What they found was recorded on film and in photographs that carried the evidence to the world. For many survivors, liberation was followed by years in displaced-persons camps, searching for family who in most cases had not survived. January 27, the date Soviet forces entered Auschwitz, was later designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The documentary record

How we know what we know.

The documentary record of the camp system is preserved in several kinds of sources:

• The Nazi regime’s own administrative records: preserved in large part, despite extensive Nazi efforts to destroy evidence in the final months of the war. The principal categories include the Höfle Telegram, described in the Object Spotlight, and the Wannsee Conference minutes, drafted by Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who managed the deportations. They include the surviving records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, and the records of the killing centers themselves where they survived. They also include the corporate records of the German firms that took part in the system.
• The postwar trial records: the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1949), the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1961), the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–1965), and the long series of trials that followed, told in Unit 6 · Ch. 02 · The Postwar Trials. Together they produced documentary records, witness testimony under oath, and the cumulative documentation that has anchored the scholarly literature.
• Reports smuggled out during the war: on April 7, 1944, two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz. Their report on the camp, written in Slovakia that April, was meant to warn Hungary’s Jews. Published in the Swiss press in June, it added to the foreign pressure that led Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy, to halt the deportations in early July 1944.
• The survivor testimony archive: the testimony archives at Yad Vashem, the USHMM, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale, and the collections of the major Jewish historical archives.
• The research of the major memorial museums: particularly the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Yad Vashem’s research institutes, and the USHMM’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has produced a continuous body of scholarly research on the camp since its establishment in 1947.
• The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: the systematic documentation of more than 44,000 individual sites across the Nazi system, conducted by the USHMM’s Mandel Center and published by Indiana University Press beginning in 2009. Four volumes have appeared so far, with three more planned.

The camps today

The preserved sites.

The principal camp sites are preserved as memorial museums, open to scholars, teachers, students, and the general public, with teaching programs built across decades. The camp sites, from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Terezín, with links and what to know before visiting, are gathered on Virtual Field Trips · Holocaust Memorials & Museums.

Key takeaways

• The Nazi camp system consisted of several distinct types of camps, each created for different purposes.
• Concentration camps imprisoned, exploited, and brutalized prisoners, and great numbers of them died there. Killing centers were built to murder arriving populations, primarily by gas.
• All six killing centers (Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau) operated in German-occupied Poland.
• Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek combined killing-center, concentration-camp, and forced-labor functions in one complex.
• Forced-labor camps were the largest category by number of sites. The SS leased prisoner labor to German firms for a daily fee.
• Transit camps such as Westerbork, Drancy, Mechelen, and Theresienstadt held deportees from Western and Central Europe before transport eastward. The deportations ran on local registers and local police, and on agreements with Germany’s allies.
• The system is documented across Nazi records, postwar trials, survivor testimony, and the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, which has catalogued more than 44,000 sites.
• Prisoners rose up at Treblinka and Sobibór in 1943 and at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. Two prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and wrote a report meant to warn Hungary’s Jews.

Object Spotlight

The Höfle Telegram.

It is one page of intercepted radio traffic: a message sent in January 1943 by SS officer Hermann Höfle, reporting to Berlin the cumulative arrivals at the Operation Reinhard camps. British listeners caught the transmission and decoded it, and the decrypt sheet was filed away with the war’s other secrets.

The figures on that single page, including 434,508 for Bełżec, are the perpetrators’ own running totals, radioed in code at the height of the killing. Found in 2000 and published in 2001, the intercept anchored the documentary record for Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Majdanek.

The sheet is preserved among the decoded intercepts in the British National Archives, catalogued as HW 16/23.

Read the documents

The record itself.

• Document. The intercepted reports: British decrypts of the camps’ daily prisoner-count radio traffic (HW 16/23). The National Archives (UK) ↗
• Map. The camp system at its height, January 1944. USHMM ↗

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Each question is anchored in a fact this Chapter documents. Answer from the evidence on the page.

1. The Chapter distinguishes a concentration camp from a killing center by purpose. How would you explain that distinction to someone who has only ever heard the phrase “concentration camp”?
2. Many camps stood near towns and cities, while the killing centers were placed in more remote locations. What does that difference suggest about what the regime tried to make public and what it tried to conceal?
3. The Höfle Telegram and the Ringelblum Archive reached historians by very different routes. What does each kind of source allow us to know, and what are the limits of each?
4. The Sobibór and Treblinka revolts are documented in survivor testimony. How do historians check one survivor’s account against other testimony and documents?
5. Using the Auschwitz selection process, how were the forced-labor system and the killing system linked?
6. Why might historians treat the number of victims at some camps as well-documented while describing others as estimates?

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Examines the structure and function of concentration camps, labor camps, transit camps, and killing centers within the Holocaust.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • distinguish the camp types by purpose
  • use the historical terms precisely (concentration camp, killing center, transit camp)
  • interpret documentary evidence, including the Höfle decrypt
  • test common misconceptions against the record.
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, genocide studies, and museum education.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by distinguishing the different types of camps and correcting common misconceptions.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students analyze camp records, maps, photographs, survivor testimony, and historical scholarship.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1, D2.His.14. Students investigate historical categorization, chronology, and evidence.

Resources, lessons, and video

Where to teach this well.

The major Holocaust institutions have built decades of classroom material on the camps. The lessons, testimony, and visual material below come from that work.

Teacher materials & lesson plans

• USHMM · Teaching Materials, guidelines for teaching the Holocaust, ready lessons, and the searchable Holocaust Encyclopedia entries on every camp named here.
• Yad Vashem · International School for Holocaust Studies, lesson plans and units organized by grade band.
• Echoes & Reflections, a full classroom curriculum (its unit on the “Final Solution” covers the camps and killing centers) with survivor testimony built in.
• Facing History & Ourselves, lessons that set the camps within the choices and steps that led to them.

Testimony & video

• USC Shoah Foundation · IWitness, survivor video testimony with built-in, standards-aligned activities.
• The National WWII Museum · “The Liberation of Auschwitz”, a sourced classroom article on what the liberators found and how the world learned of it.
• Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial · online panorama, a guided virtual walk through the preserved site for classrooms that cannot travel.
• USHMM · classroom film, The Path to Nazi Genocide, the museum’s free 38-minute overview film for secondary classrooms, with a viewing guide. Grades 9–12.

For New York–region teachers. The Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County (Glen Cove, Long Island) runs in-school programs and a Speakers Bureau, and offers a free virtual guide to its galleries, including one on life in the camps.