Concentration camp

The first camps appeared as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933, and Dachau, opened in March that year, became the model for the whole system. From 1934 the camps were run solely by the SS, and from 1942 by its Economic and Administrative Main Office, which harnessed the prisoners to the war economy. Inmates included communists and Social Democrats, clergy, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, people labelled 'asocial', Jews and Roma, and during the war hundreds of thousands of Poles and citizens of other occupied countries.

During the war there were a few dozen main camps and more than a thousand subcamps. Some 1.65 million prisoners were registered in them, of whom around a million or more died – of hunger, exhausting labour and disease, in executions and in experiments. A concentration camp was distinct from an extermination camp, although Auschwitz and Majdanek combined both roles.