Concentration camps and Extermination centres/camps

Who did the Nazis target?

A teacher’s guide from

Concentration Camps

• Concentration camps were prison camps originally established for political opponents.

• One of the first actions of the Nazi regime was to build the first concentration camp at Dachau in 1933.

• Over time these camps expanded their target population to include people that the Nazi regime thought were inferior or might endanger the Third Reich.

• The concentration camps, although not established as centres for extermination, were places with brutal regimes where hundreds of thousands died.

• There was a big push for slave labour in 1944.• Many camps were forced to move their inmates by “death

marches” as Allied forces approached.

The Spread of Concentration Camps

Millions of people were deported to concentration camps across Germany (and its occupied territories) and a large

proportion of inmates died.

Who did Hitler regard as inferior or dangerous?

People with physical or mental disabilities

Slavic peoples, especially Poles and Russians

Homosexuals

Black people

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Romani people

Jews

The Nazi view of the world was promoted by propaganda which created and reinforced prejudices and stereotypes and made it

easier for the German population to accept Nazi actions.

People with physical and mental disabilities

Propaganda poster – “Life only as a burden”

Towards the end of 1939 Hitler authorised a killing programme of people with physical and mental disabilities. It was secret and called the T4 programme (Tiergartenstrasse 4 was the administration address).

It started with the murder of disabled children by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation .

This was extended to adults with disabilities and six gassing centres were put in service.

It is estimated that over 200,000 will have died in these centres over the years of the war.

Hartheim Castle in Austria, one of the gassing centres. It was close to Mauthausen

concentration camp and received prisoners from there for killing.

Extermination Centres for disabled people (“euthanasia centres”)

Slavic peoples, especially Poles, Ukrainians and Russians

Nazi racial teaching identified Slavs as inferior and Poland had a largely Slavic population.

This made it easier for Nazis to claim Polish territory for themselves and to deal with Poles with a particular brutality.

The intellectual and professional classes were systematically murdered and the less influential classes were forced into labour camps.

It is estimated that the Nazis killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II.

Other Slavic territories suffered similarly.

Homosexuals

Pink triangle required to be worn by

homosexuals in concentration camps

“Threat to masculinity”

“We must exterminate these people root and branch; the homosexual must be eliminated.” Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister in 1933.

The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted over one million German men who were regarded by the Third Reich as degenerate and threatened the "disciplined masculinity" of Germany.

Denounced as enemies of the State over 100,000 men were arrested under a law against homosexuality. Many ended their lives in a concentration camp where they wore the pink triangle.

Female homosexuals were not persecuted to the same degree.

Black people

Hitler thought that black people contaminated the purity of the Aryan race. Race laws prohibited inter-marriage

between black and white people. There were also compulsory sterilization programmes of black people.

Propaganda poster – “Racial pride fades”

Jehovah’s witnesses

Purple triangle to be worn in concentration camps identifying a Jehovah’s Witness

Religious, not racial, persecution

Jehovah's Witnesses were one of a range of religious groups against whom the Nazis took action from 1933, stating that they "contributed to the ideological fragmentation of the German people“ and so stopping the united image so desired in Hitler’s totalitarian utopia.

The SS burned the pamphlets and Bibles of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Jehovah’s Witnesses could be spared if they undertook to “worship” the Fuhrer, gave up pacifism and joined the Nazi party together with their children.

Very few chose to do so and many were sent to concentration camps.

Extermination camps

• Before the establishment of extermination camps over 1 million Jews were killed by face-to-face shootings in eastern Poland, Ukraine, Baltic states, Belarus and western Russia in 1941-42.

• Extermination camps were primarily established for the purpose of efficiently murdering the Jewish population of German-occupied Europe.

• In some of these camps the systematic murder of Romani people also took place.

• The main means of killing was by gassing.• The original camp at Auschwitz started as a concentration camp,

but with the building of the Birkenau sub-camp it also became an extermination camp.

Primary Extermination Camps

Romani people

Gypsy “plague” propaganda

Roma and Sinti

The Romani population was identified under Nazi racial laws as sub-human.

In Nazi-occupied territory many were deported, imprisoned, forcibly sterilized and sent to concentration and extermination camps.

Large numbers of Roma were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the camp authorities housed them in a special compound that was called the "Gypsy family camp." At least 19,000 of the 23,000 Roma sent to Auschwitz died there.

The total number of Romani who died in the Holocaust is uncertain, but estimates of 500,000 are not uncommon.

Romani at Belzec extermination camp

Jews

Jews portrayed as poisonous mushrooms in school books

The Final SolutionPropaganda played an important part in fuelling anti-Semitic feelings amongst the general German population . Hitler himself was obsessed with ridding the Third Reich of all its Jews.

Jews were variously characterised as being Capitalists, Communists, Bolsheviks and robbing the German people of what was theirs by right.

Jews were then systematically robbed of their own legal rights until in the early 1940s they were robbed of their physical freedom through being forced into ghettos and labour or concentration camps.

This culminated in the Nazis’ “Final Solution” which involved deportations directly to extermination camps.

6 million Jews died, including over a million children. Shoes of those who did not survive

Acknowledgments

• Slide 3. Courtesy of Anne Frank House• Slide 7/16. Courtesy of USHMM• Slide 14. Courtesy of Wikipedia• Images on other Slides courtesy of Yad Vashem

We are grateful to Professor Dan Stone of Royal Holloway, University of London for giving freely of his advice. Any errors are entirely our own.

We are also grateful to our funders:

International Holocaust RemembranceAlliance

Bernard Charitable Trust

British Embassy Bucharest

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