List of Nazi Concentration Camps

List Of Nazi Concentration Camps

This article presents a partial list of more prominent Nazi concentration camps set up across Europe during World War II and the 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 Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library writes: "It is estimated that the Nazis established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries." Most of these camps were destroyed.

The first Nazi concentration camps (German: Konzentrationslager) were built in 1933 after the Nazis seized power and were not the systematic, organized camps of the later years. These "early concentration camps" (also called "wild concentration camps") were primarily temporary and were set up to confine, interrogate, torture, and thereby weaken, the Nazis' political opponents. Under the control of the SA, SS, Gestapo and so on, these early camps did not last for long. The later camps, built by the Third Reich mostly between 1939 and 1942, were intended to hold large groups of prisoners without trial or judicial process, including Jews, gypsies, Slavs, prisoners of war and many others, seen as undesirable by the occupation administration. In modern historiography, the term refers to a place of mistreatment, starvation, forced labour, and murder. Some of the data presented in this table originates from The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowicz.