German concentration camp

This article presents a partial list of the most prominent Nazi German concentration camps set up across Europe during the course of World War II and the ensuing Holocaust. A more complete list drawn up in 1967 by the German Ministry of Justice names about 1,200 camps and subcamps in countries occupied by Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library writes: "It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries." The concentration camps are not to be confused with the extermination camps which were designed and built exclusively to kill prisoners on a massive scale immediately upon arrival. The extermination camps of Operation Reinhard such as Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka served as "death factories" in which German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting. Meanwhile, the concentration camps listed herein served primarily as detention and slave labor exploitation centers. Most of them were destroyed by the Germans in an attempt to hide the evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity; nevertheless tens of thousands of prisoners sent on death marches were liberated by the Allies afterward.

The concentration camps held large groups of prisoners without trial or judicial process. In modern historiography, the term refers to a place of systemic mistreatment, starvation, forced labour and murder. In 1933-1939, before the onset of war, most prisoners consisted of German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of 'asocial' or socially 'deviant' behavior by the Germans. They have not been utilized to sustain the German war effort, unlike the prisoners of 42,500 camps and ghettos in which an estimated 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned and often pressed into slavery during the subsequent years, according to research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum conducted more recently. Though the term 'concentration camp' is often used as a general term for all German camps, there were in fact several types of concentration camps in the German camp system during World War II. Holocaust scholars make a clear distinction between death camps and concentration camps which served a number of war related purposes including prison facilities, labor camps, prisoner of war camps, and transit camps among others.

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