Concentration Camps in Europe

The Nazi camp system was a central instrument of persecution and mass murder during the Third Reich and World War II. Beginning soon after the Nazis took power, camps were used to imprison political opponents, and they expanded into a vast network detaining Jews, Roma, prisoners of war and many others. Over time the system grew to include both concentration camps, which combined imprisonment with forced labour, and dedicated extermination camps built for systematic killing.

Dachau, established early in the regime, served as a model whose organisation and methods influenced later camps. As the war spread, the network extended across occupied Europe, with major sites including Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck and many others. Prisoners endured starvation rations, disease, exhausting forced labour and brutal punishment, and death rates were extremely high. Camps such as Theresienstadt also functioned as transit points, holding people before deportation onward to killing sites.

The extermination camps in occupied Poland, among them Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka and Majdanek, were designed for mass murder, often killing deported people very soon after arrival. Auschwitz combined a large concentration and labour complex with extermination facilities and became the deadliest site of the genocide. Deportations were funnelled through collection points and rail networks, with locations such as the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw marking the place where ghetto inhabitants were loaded onto trains. The liberation of these camps at the end of the war revealed the full scale of the crimes to the world.

Frequently asked questions

When did the Nazi camp system begin?

The first camps were set up soon after the Nazis came to power, initially to imprison political opponents. The system later expanded enormously during the war to detain and murder Jews and many other groups.

Why was Auschwitz the deadliest camp?

Auschwitz combined a large forced-labour and concentration complex with extermination facilities. Its scale and the number of people deported there made it the site where the greatest number of victims were killed.

What was the Umschlagplatz?

The Umschlagplatz was the collection point in the Warsaw ghetto where Jews were assembled and loaded onto trains for deportation to extermination camps such as Treblinka.