The German killing machine

The idea of Nazi concentration camps was implemented less than a month after Adolf Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. This was the result of support demonstrated by the German society for the Nazi party, expressed in parliamentary elections. After the NSDAP’s unquestioned victory in 1932, it became the largest party of the Reichstag.

The Devilish system

On 28 February 1933, the new head of the German government – Adolf Hitler, issued the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which called for the establishment of Schutzhaft, or “security arrests”. From that moment on, every person considered an enemy of the German state or people could be imprisoned indefinitely in specially designated places of isolation.

The Dachau camp, set up on 22 March 1933, was the first camp functioning in the German territory. In April of the same year, Herman Göring legalized the idea of concentration camps. The Concentration Camps Inspectorate in Oranienburg, headed by Theodor Eicke, served as the supervisory and managerial authority for the concentration camps network of the Third Reich. Eicke also drafted detailed instructions as to the treatment of prisoners. Camp guards were advised to use harsh punishments, e.g. confinement in darkened cells, isolation, beating or even the death penalty. The prisoners included political opponents, people from the so-called margins of society, homosexuals, religious minorities, Jews and priests. The prisoners were detained indefinitely. It was up to the SS officers to decide on the termination of a sentence. Training centers for KL personnel were established as part of  larger camps. Staff needed for the increasingly growing number of new camps were trained there.

Heart of darkness

The camps established by the Germans in occupied Poland were particularly cruel in nature. From the outset of the war, Poles continued their fight for freedom, for which they were often sent to one of the concentration camps. There, they were beaten, humiliated, starved and forced to work beyond human endurance. Their health suffered greatly, which contributed to numerous deaths.

Along with the changing situation on the fronts of World War II, the role of concentration camps also changed. They began to serve as a source of cheap labor for the Reich’s economy. In addition to concentration camps, the Germans also established forced labor, resettlement, transit, prisoner-of-war, children’s and youth camps, as well as ghettos for Jews. An estimated number of 900 sub-divisions of the main camps were set up.

The plan to murder all European Jews was approved at the conference in Wannsee near Berlin in 1942. The Germans implemented this plan in extermination camps established in occupied Poland. They carried out mass murders with the use of gas chambers, constructed specifically for this purpose.

“For the first time in history, people were killed in a manner reminiscent of an industrial assembly line”

— this comparison was used by the camp doctor and war criminal, Friedrich Entress in 1947. The extermination camps were established to annihilate the Jewish population, but their subsequent victims were also Poles, the Roma people and Soviet prisoners of war.

Hiding the truth from the world

The German authorities did everything they could to hide the truth about what really took place in the camps. They were surrounded by densely woven barbed-wire fences, electrified with lethal voltages and watched over by guards constantly ready to carry out the order of shooting anybody who approached the fence. Mass executions, the constant running of the gas chambers and crematorium furnaces, extremely arduous work, starvation, the terror and cruelty of the personnel – were all part of the camp’s hidden reality.

Katarzyna Pawlak Weiss, IPN

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