In the 12 years that the National Socialist Party was in power in Germany, upwards of 15,000 concentration and labor camps were established in the Greater Reich and the occupied countries to incarcerate all who were deemed enemies of the state. Contents includes: GERMANY Dachau, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Niederhagen/Wewelsburg, Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau-Dora-Nordhausen, Arbeitsdorf. AUSTRIA Mauthausen. BELGIUM Breendonk, Mechelen: Caserne Dossin. CZECHOSLOVAKIA Theresienstadt. ESTONIA Vaivara/Klooga. FRANCE French Transit Camps, Natzweiler-Struthof, Wiesengrund/Vaihingen. HOLLAND Westerbork, Amersfoort, Herzogenbusch/Vught. ITALY Fossoli, Bolzano, Risiera di San Sabba. LATVIA Riga-Kaiserwald. LITHUANIA Kauen. NORWAY Falstad, Grini. UNITED KINGDOM Alderney, Channel Islands. BERLIN Wannsee Conference and Operation ‘Reinhard’. POLAND The Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek-Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof-Danzig, Krakow-Plaszow, Auschwitz , Birkenau, War Crimes Trials.

Eyewitness accounts and testimonies given at the First International Liberators Conference held in Washington, D.C. in Oct. 1981.

Weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazi regime established the first concentration camps in Germany. Initially used for real and suspected political enemies, the camps increasingly came under SS control and became sites for the repression of social outsiders and German Jews. Terror was central to the Nazi regime from the beginning, and the camps gradually moved toward the center of repression, torture, and mass murder during World War II and the Holocaust. This collection brings together revealing primary documents on the crucial origins of the Nazi concentration camp system in the prewar years between 1933 and 1939, which have been overlooked thus far. Many of the documents are unpublished and have been translated into English for the first time. These documents provide insight into the camps from multiple perspectives, including those of prisoners, Nazi officials, and foreign observers, and shed light on the complex relationship between terror, state, and society in the Third Reich.

Of the estimated six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, it is believed that at least three million died in work camps, where Jews were forced on pain of death to work on behalf the German military or perform backbreaking labor, and death camps like Auschwitz and Dachau. Originally built as prisons for Adolf Hitler's political opponents, these camps became the last stop for those deemed unacceptable under the Nazi regime, whether because of their race, religion, sexuality, or other attribute. Readers will learn of the horrors of the gas chambers, which could kill hundreds at once, the countless crematoria for burning dead bodies, and the horrific experiments of the infamous Joseph Mengele. Survivors' accounts of these atrocities will spur student discussion of trauma and PTSD, while tales of resistance attempts will engender conversation about courageous action in the face of almost certain death.

Concentration camps, the epicenters of Nazi atrocities, represent a harrowing chapter of world and human history. Part of a highly organized system intended to decimate Europe’s Jewish population and other groups deemed undesirable by Adolf Hitler’s regime, these detention and extermination facilities enabled genocide to a degree never before seen in modern history. This volume chronicles the development of the concentration camp system and examines the various types of camps, the deplorable conditions and treatment the camps’ victims faced, and the aftermath of the Holocaust. Documentation and eyewitness accounts from survivors and camp liberators supplement the narrative and highlight the horrors of the camps.

Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps examines the slave labor carried out by concentration camp prisoners from 1942 and the effect this had on the German wartime economy. This work goes far beyond the sociohistorical 'reconstructions' that dominate Holocaust studies - it combines cultural history with structural history, drawing relationships between social structures and individual actions. It also considers the statements of both perpetrators and victims, and takes the biographical approach as the only possible way to confront the destruction of the individual in the camps after the fact. The first chapter presents a comparative analysis of slave labor across the different concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. The subsequent chapters analyse the similarities and differences between various subcamps where prisoners were utilised for the wartime economy, based on the example of the 86 subcamps of Neuengamme concentration camp, which were scattered across northern Germany. The most significant difference between conditions at the various subcamps was that in some, hardly any prisoners died, while in others, almost half of them did. This work carries out a systematic comparison of the subcamp system, a kind of study which does not exist for any other camp system. This is of great significance, because by the end of the war most concentration camps had placed over 80 percent of their prisoners in subcamps. This work therefore offers a comparative framework that is highly useful for further examinations of National Socialist concentration camps, and may also be of benefit to comparative studies of other camp systems, such as Stalin's gulags.

The notorious concentration camp system was a central pillar of the Third Reich, supporting the Nazi war against political, racial and social outsiders whilst also intimidating the population at large. Established during the first months of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, several million men, women and children of many nationalities had been incarcerated in the camps by the end of the Second World War. At least two million lost their lives. This comprehensive volume offers the first overview of the recent scholarship that has changed the way the camps are studied over the last two decades. Written by an international team of experts, the book covers such topics as the earliest camps; social life, work and personnel in the camps; the public face of the camps; issues of gender and commemoration; and the relationship between concentration camps and the Final Solution. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the current historiography of the camps, highlighting the key conclusions that have been made, commenting on continuing areas of debate, and suggesting possible directions for future research.

Blends the personal testimony of Holocaust survivor, Jack Mandelbaum, with the history of his time, documented by photos from the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. What was the secret to surviving the death camps? How did you keep from dying of heartbreak in a place of broken hearts and broken bodies? "Think of it as a game, Jack," an older prisoner tells him. "Play the game right and you might outlast the Nazis." Caught up in Hitler's Final Solution to annihilate Europe's Jews, fifteen-year-old Jack is torn from his family and thrown into the nightmarish world of the concentration camps. Despite intolerable conditions, Jack resolves not to hate his captors, and vows to see his family again. He forges friendships with other prisoners, and together they struggle to make it one more hour, one more day. But even with his strong will to live, can Jack survive the life-and-death game he is forced to play with his Nazi captors? Award-winning author Andrea Warren has crafted an unforgettable true a story of courage, friendship, family love, and a boy becoming a man in the shadow of the Third Reich

"Focuses on the major Nazi concentration camps as defined by Heinrich Himmler; the concentration system as it evolved; the actions, reactions, and feelings of the different groups of people involved in it; and the many phases of the process of dehumanization, destruction and death"--Preface.

When the German Wehrmacht swarmed across Eastern Europe, an elite corps followed close at its heels. Along with the SS and Gestapo, the Ordnungspolizei, or Uniformed Police, played a central role in Nazi genocide that until now has been generally neglected by historians of the war. Beginning with the invasion of Poland, the Uniformed Police were charged with following the army to curb resistance, pacify the countryside, patrol Jewish ghettos, and generally maintain order in the conquered territories. Edward Westermann examines how this force emerged as a primary instrument of annihilation, responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of the Third Reich's political and racial enemies. In Hitler's Police Battalions he reveals how the institutional mindset of these "ordinary policemen" allowed them to commit atrocities without a second thought. To uncover the story of how the German national police were fashioned into a corps of political soldiers, Westermann reveals initiatives pursued before the war by Heinrich Himmler and Kurt Daluege to create a culture within the existing police forces that fostered anti-Semitism and anti-Communism as institutional norms. Challenging prevailing interpretations of German culture, Westermann draws on extensive archival research—including the testimony of former policemen—to illuminate this transformation and the callous organizational culture that emerged. Purged of dissidents, indoctrinated to idolize Hitler, and trained in military combat, these police battalions-often numbering several hundred men-repeatedly conducted actions against Jews, Slavs, gypsies, asocials, and other groups on their own initiative, even when they had the choice not to. In addition to documenting these atrocities, Westermann examines cooperation between the Ordnungspolizei and the SS and Gestapo, and the close relationship between police and Wehrmacht in the conduct of the anti-partisan campaign of annihilation. Throughout, Westermann stresses the importance of ideological indoctrination and organizational initiatives within specific groups. It was the organizational culture of the Uniformed Police, he maintains, and not German culture in general that led these men to commit genocide. Hitler's Police Battalions provides the most complete and comprehensive study to date of this neglected branch of Himmler's SS and Police empire and adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust and the war on the Eastern front.