What was holocaust concentration camps

Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial. Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in , on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13, Jews including 4, children were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east.

Only a handful ever returned. In August of , Anne, her family and others who were hiding from the occupying German Security forces, were all captured and shipped off to a series of prisons and concentration camps. Anne died from typhus at age 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her posthumously published diary has made her a symbol of all Jews killed in World War II.

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in by Lili Jacob.

Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1. Within three months, both were dead. Photographer and fellow prisoner Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a documentary: "She was so young and so terrified.

The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo a prisoner overseer took a stick and beat her about the face.

This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing.

Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere.

It would have been fatal for me. A victim of Nazi medical experimentation. A victim's arm shows a deep burn from phosphorus at Ravensbrueck, Germany, in November of The photograph shows the results of a medical experiment dealing with phosphorous that was carried out by doctors at Ravensbrueck.

In the experiment, a mixture of phosphorus and rubber was applied to the skin and ignited. After twenty seconds, the fire was extinguished with water. After three days, the burn was treated with Echinacin in liquid form.

After two weeks the wound had healed. This photograph, taken by a camp physician, was entered as evidence during the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg. Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp, after the liberation of the camp in American soldiers silently inspect some of the rail trucks loaded with dead which were found on the rail siding at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, on May 3, A starved Frenchman sits among the dead in a sub-camp of the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp, in Nordhausen, Germany, in April of Bodies lie piled against the walls of a crematory room in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany.

The bodies were found by U. Seventh Army troops who took the camp on May 14, Three U. Photo taken in an unidentified concentration camp in Germany, at time of liberation by U. This heap of ashes and bones is the debris from one day's killing of German prisoners by 88 troopers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar in Germany, shown on April 25, Prisoners at the electric fence of Dachau concentration camp cheer American soldiers in Dachau, Germany in an undated photo.

Some of them wear the striped blue and white prison garb. They decorated their huts with flags of all nations which they had made secretly as they heard the guns of the 42nd Rainbow Division getting louder and louder on the approach to Dachau. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other American officers in the Ohrdruf concentration camp, shortly after the liberation of the camp in April of As American forces approached, the guards shot the remaining prisoners.

A dying prisoner, too weak to sit up amid his rags and filth, victim of starvation and incredible brutality, at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany on April 18, Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner Street in Gruenwald, Germany, on April 29, Many thousands of prisoners were marched forcibly from outlying prison camps to camps deeper inside Germany as Allied forces closed in.

Thousands died along the way, anyone unable to keep up was executed on the spot. Pictured, fourth from the right, is Dimitry Gorky who was born on August 19, in Blagoslovskoe, Russia to a family of peasant farmers. The reason for his imprisonment is not known. Photo released by the U. Holocaust Memorial Museum. American soldiers walk by row after row of corpses lying on the ground beside barracks at the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen, Germany, on April 17, The camp is located about 70 miles west of Leipzig.

As the camp was liberated on April 12, the U. This telegram was sent from Dr. Wilhelm Gross, who was incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp, to his daughter Dora Gross, who had escaped as a refugee to Britain. Transit camps were camps where prisoners were briefly detained prior to deportation to other Nazi camps.

Following the start of the Second World War , the Nazis occupied a number of countries. Here, they implemented antisemitic and racial policies as they had done in Germany. These policies led to the establishment of a number of transit camps across the different occupied countries. Prisoners were held in these camps prior to their deportation to other camps, such as Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.

Overall, the conditions in the transit camps were similar to that of concentration camps — unsanitary and awful. Facilities were poor and overcrowding was common. Unlike most of the concentration camps within Germany not all of the transit camps were run by the SS.

Camps could be run by local collaborators in the countries that they were based, such as Drancy, near Paris in France, which was run by the French Police until The Nazis started using forced labour shortly after their rise to power. They established specific Arbeitslager labour camps which housed Ostarbeite r eastern workers , Fremdarbeiter foreign workers and other forced labourers who were forcibly rounded up and brought in from the east.

These were separate from the SS-run concentration camps, where prisoners were also forced to perform labour. The use of forced labour first began to grow significantly in , as rearmament caused labour shortages.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the use of labour again increased sharply. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June further heightened demands on the war economy, and in turn, for labour. At the same time, this invasion brought thousands of potential new workers under Nazi control. These prisoners were called Ostarbeiter eastern workers and Fremdarbeiter foreign workers.

The Nazis deported these people to forced labour camps, where they worked to produce supplies for the increasingly strained war economy or in construction efforts. As in most Nazi camps, conditions in forced labour camps were inadequate.

Inmates were only ever seen as temporary, and, in the Nazis view, could always be replaced with others: there was a complete disregard for the health of prisoners. They were subject to insufficiencies of food, equipment, medicine and clothing, whilst working long hours.

There was little or no time for rest or breaks. As a result of these conditions, death rates in labour camps were extremely high. By , more than fourteen million people had been exploited in the network of hundreds of forced labour camps that stretched across the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe.

This drawing by prisoner R. This camp was used to incarcerate British Navy personnel from until its liberation in May Typically, inmates in prisoner of war camps were allowed to send and receive letters from their families, although this process could take several weeks or months.

This is an unused prisoner of war airmail letter. The prisoner of war camps were subject to strict rules and regulations. The prisoners of war must observe strict military discipline in the camp and outside the camp. The camp leader and the guards are the superiors of all the POWs of the camp to whom they must behave according to military honours. Allied military officers and personnel who were captured by, or surrendered to, the Nazis were also imprisoned in camps.

By then, the SS held most prisoners in satellite camps, which had sprung up near factories and building sites.

The end came in the first months of , when Allied troops conquered what was left of the Third Reich. But liberation came too late for many concentration camp inmates. Between January and May when Germany capitulated , an estimated , prisoners died. Victims of disease, starvation and execution, they died inside the hellish compounds and on death marches away from abandoned camps. Overall, some 2. Their fate was shaped by many factors, such as age, gender and nationality.

They all experienced the camps differently. Inmate relations were often tense, but there was also much comradeship and resistance. The SS ruled the concentration camps with an iron fist. It enforced brutal rules and rigid schedules. But just as there was no typical camp and no typical prisoner, there was no typical perpetrator either. By no means all men and women in the Camp SS were depraved murderers. But most of them quickly got used to the abuse of prisoners and upheld SS terror to the end.

Liberation was no happy end. Most prisoners had died before the Allies arrived. And the camps left a bitter legacy for survivors. They suffered from injuries and haunting memories, while most perpetrators got away unpunished.

Meanwhile, ordinary Germans often pleaded ignorance. They did not know about the SS crimes, they said.