> Concentration Camps

The Nazis had built the most horrifying industry in the human race - an industry of destroying life. They had set up an enormous and highly complex concentration and destruction system. People are often terrified from the descriptions of the camps that they seldom realize the variations of the camps. It is totally understandable. How can anyone contemplate at the varying purpose of the many camps when all of them had done just the same thing - murdered people? Now, let us analyze this brutal killing system. We shall remind ourselves not to be overwhelmed by our emotions, for it often result in subjective conclusions. However, there is no doubt that even objective conclusions are as equally severe as subjective ones.

Camps were established when Hitler came into power for isolating, punishing, and killing Germans suspected of opposition to his ruling. Before 1938, the camps were primarily places for the protective custody of political enemies of the government, not as the death pits, labor extractors, and medical research laboratories they eventually evolved into.

When first constructed, the camps had no buildings, services, and facilities. Food is also scarce in initial camps. However, as facilities gradually installed, these camps grew into something gigantic and scarier. The system with its main and official concentration camps and thousands of subsidiary camps stretched like a poisonous spider web over Europe. Economic exploitation and mass murder soon came in place of security functions as the number of prisoners increased dramatically.

The camps jailed people of many categories. Among them four groups received the severest methods employed by the Nazis: the Jews, the Gypsies, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. No one knows exactly how many camps existed, but they numbered in the thousands. Since the Nazis did not keep an accurate accounting system, no one knows how many humans passed the system, or what the death toll was. When the Nazis transferred prisoners within the system, they destroyed as many records as possible. An estimation was made that as least eleven million died in it, and that six to eight million among the deaths were Jews. It proved that Hitler's destruction of Jewry was more important than anything else, including the military war on Europe. In reality, both wars depended on each other. The military war could not progressed without the labor of the Jews. So Jews were kept alive to work. As the other war conquered more lands, more Jews would be available to exterminate. But the longer that war, the greater need for labor. Because of this cycle, a sizable number of Jews survived.

The Nazis' official categorization of the major camps and centers was quite precise. Only nineteen primary camps existed. The remaining thousands were either attached to, allied with, or under the supervision of the Big Nineteen. The camps were originally categorized neatly until the system became more complex and the functions inevitably began to overlap. Only the killing centers retained their purity. The Big Nineteen were categorized as the following: the four killing center, the official concentration camps, the eleven concentration camps given official status by Himmler, the official reception and holding center, and the unique fortress town. The only difference between the killing centers and the extermination/labor centers is the presence or absence of a single-minded purpose to kill. The similarities linked these centers: experimentation, technical development, and a peculiar chaos.

At first, chaos marked the entire system because everything occurred on an experimental basis due to the lack of experience to create a killing system. The methods of execution were terribly inefficient. The early gas chambers yielded still-living bodies. The ovens in the crematoria destroyed one body at a time. The mass graves left behind arms and legs erupt from the earth. All the commandants care were the share of the limited materials and money. The disposal of bodies was the most serious problem faced by all camps. It was not until the final months of the war that the camps found solution to this problem. Crematoria had been reconstructed to hold more bodies; fat was drained off, then added again to make the bodies burn faster; bodies were rolled or pulled in mechanically. A more efficient type of gas was used in the gas chambers. The chambers were also enlarged to hold more bodies. Bone-crushing machines helped reduce problems in the final disposal stage. The process, the system of killing, was indeed evolved into an advanced industry, which means the killing of more human beings.