Concentration Camps

The Nazis camp system started as a system of repression directed against political opponents of the Nazi state. In the early years of the Third Reich (the German Government), the Nazis imprisoned mostly communists and Socialists. In about 1935 the regime also began imprisoning those whom it designated as racially or biologically inferior especially Jews.

During World War II the Nazi camp system expanded. The purpose of the camps evolved far beyond imprisonment,it lead hard and painful labor and plain outright murder. The Germans in Europe arrested those who resisted their domination and those who they judged to be racially inferior or politically unacceptable. People who were arrested for resisting the Germans rules were mostly sent to concentration camps.

After the war ended there was an increased number of concentration camps and prisoners. After three years the number of prisoners quadrupled. The number of prisoners went from 25,000 to 100,000 in March 1942. The population of the camp included prisoners from almost every European nation.

The prisoners that worked in the concentration camps were literally worked to death. According to the SS reports there were more than 700,000 prisoners registered in the concentration camps in the winter of 1945. SS reports are recordings of things that happened in towns or camps like concentration camps. Jews were sent from the Germans from all around occupied Europe to extermination camps in Poland. There they were systematically killed and like in the concentration camps they were forced to do hard labor. Several hundred thousand Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war were also systematically murdered.

Roll call, Buchenwald, Germany, 1942-1943

The prisoners were required to wear color coded triangles on their jackets so the guards and the officers could identify them and their background easily enough. Political prisoners like communists,socialists and trade unionists wore triangles that were red. Jehovah’s Witnesses wore purple and the homosexuals wore pink. The letters would indicate nationality. An example of this is P stood for Polish F stood for French and SU stood for Soviet Union.