concentration camp

Entrance gate to Auschwitz concentration camp, Auschwitz, Poland. The words above the gate read ‘work makes us free’.

Perimeter fence and watchtower, Auschwitz, Poland. Auschwitz was one of the most notorious concentration camps implemented by the Nazis during World War II.

Arrival of deportees at the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1944, during World War II.

The Nazi concentration camp at Langerstein, Germany, showing freed prisoners with one of the liberating troops in 1945. At the end of 1944 inmates were working night and day to build tunnels to house German underground rocket factories. Many died because of the terrible working conditions, and those who survived were found at liberation to be suffering from disease or acute starvation.

Prison camp for civilians in wartime or under totalitarian rule. Concentration camps called reconcentrados were used by the Spanish in Cuba in 1896, to ‘reconcentrate’ Cubans in urban areas (and in which 200,000 were believed to have died), and by the British during the Second Boer War in South Africa in 1899 for the detention of Afrikaner women and children (with the subsequent deaths of more than 20,000 people). A system of hundreds of concentration camps was developed by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe (1933–45) to imprison Jews and political and ideological opponents after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. The most infamous camps in World War II were the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The total number of people who died at the camps exceeded 6 million, and some inmates were subjected to medical experimentation before being killed.

At Oświȩcim (Auschwitz-Birkenau), a vast camp complex was created for imprisonment and slave labour as well as the extermination of up to 4 million people in gas chambers or by other means. In addition to Jews, the victims included socialists, Romanies, homosexuals, and ‘defectives’. At Maidanek, about 1.5 million people were exterminated and cremated; their ashes were used as fertilizer and land infill. Many camp officials and others responsible were tried after 1945 for war crimes, and executed or imprisoned. Foremost was Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the extermination system, who was tried and executed by the state of Israel in 1961.