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. But there was more to the history of the camps and the Holocaust than Auschwitz. The SS operated over 25 concentration camps during the Nazi dictatorship —45 , and over 1, attached satellite camps. These camps did not all operate at the same time, however. The SS system changed all the time, and so did the prisoner population, the conditions and the buildings.
There was no typical concentration camp. The history of the camps begins in , seven years before Auschwitz was even set up.
Its place was taken by the Nazi dictatorship, led by Adolf Hitler. Although the Nazi party had lots of popular support — it gained almost 44 per cent of the vote in the last multiparty elections in March — millions of Germans still rejected it.
The new rulers brutally attacked real and imagined opponents. Many victims were taken to early camps. In , most inmates were political prisoners, above all German Communists. Many faced abuse and violence. Deaths were still rare, however, and most prisoners were released after a few weeks or months. Fear of the camps helped to break the anti-Nazi resistance.
As a result, fewer opponents ended up inside, and by October only 2, prisoners were left in concentration camps. In January , with the Soviet army approaching, Nazi officials ordered the camp abandoned and sent an estimated 60, prisoners on a forced march to other locations.
When the Soviets entered Auschwitz, they found thousands of emaciated detainees and piles of corpses left behind. To complete this mission, Hitler ordered the construction of death camps.
Auschwitz, the largest and arguably the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps, opened in the spring of Auschwitz originally was conceived as a concentration camp, to be used as a detention center for the many Polish citizens arrested after Germany annexed the country in These detainees included anti-Nazi activists, politicians, resistance members and luminaries from the cultural and scientific communities.
For one thing, it was situated near the center of all German-occupied countries on the European continent. For another, it was in close proximity to the string of rail lines used to transport detainees to the network of Nazi camps. However, not all those arriving at Auschwitz were immediately exterminated. At its peak of operation, Auschwitz consisted of several divisions.
The original camp, known as Auschwitz I, housed between 15, and 20, political prisoners. Birkenau, the biggest of the Auschwitz facilities, could hold some 90, prisoners. It also housed a group of bathhouses where countless people were gassed to death, and crematory ovens where bodies were burned.
The majority of Auschwitz victims died at Birkenau. More than 40 smaller facilities, called subcamps, dotted the landscape and served as slave-labor camps. The largest of these subcamps, Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III, began operating in and housed some 10, prisoners. By mid, the majority of those being sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz were Jews. In the very last months of the war, as the German army retreated, Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau were marched westwards to the camps in Germany.
These were the camps which were liberated by British and American armies, who discovered emaciated and dying inmates. On 9 and 10 November , the Nazis initiated a campaign of hatred against the Jewish population in all Nazi territories. Find out more about Kristallnacht.
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