Nazi Concentration Camps

Nazi Concentration Camps

Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (in German Konzentrationslager, or KZ) throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime. The term was borrowed from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War.

The number of camps quadrupled between 1939 and 1942 to 300+, as slave-laborers from across Europe, Jews, political prisoners, criminals, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally ill and others were incarcerated, generally without judicial process. The Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps, which were established by the Nazis for the industrial-scale mass murder of the predominantly Jewish ghetto and concentration camp populations.