Concentration Camp

What is a concentration camp? If you look it up on google, this is what it will tell you: “A place where large numbers of people, especially political or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazies in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933-1945, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.” There were many other different camps as well, some of the well known were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Theresienstadt, and Buchenwald. I’ll start off with Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Some of the people in this camp were used to make weapons and other materials for the war, and others were medical experiments for the Nazi’s. Some of the prisoners that didn’t follow the rules were brutally beaten, the others that tried to escape were shot on the spot. The prisoners were not allowed to question or defend themselves from the treatment they were given, and if they did, well they would get shot or beaten right then and there. The treatment they were given was not good at all. As you can imagine, there were many people coming in and out of Dachau. Nearly 11,000 Jewish people were in this camp. At the start of World War 2 the prisoners were relocated to a different camp because at this time Dachau was being used as a training site for the new SS Officers. By 1940 Bachau was back to being a concentration camp. Conditions at the camp were brutal and overcrowded, it was meant to have around 6,000 people in there at a time but had about 30,000 people instead. Over the time while Dachau was still up and running a total of 200,000 prisoners had been in and out of there. Crazy

In July of 1942, they completed the building where the killings would take place, they called this Treblinka 2, and it was located about a mile away from Treblinka 1. In Treblinka there were 265,000 people, and there was 346,000 people in Treblinka 2. What they did with Treblinka 2 was hide it, and did everything they could so nobody could see it from anywhere. Not even from the roads, or even the other camp. The people that didn’t get put into the gas chambers, had to take the dead bodies out and burn them and then had to burry them. Treblinka was divided into three parts; the reception area, living area and the execution area. Randomly like in Sobibor, they would take the few selected people that were working for them and kill them and then replace them with new ones. The people in this camp mainly came from the ghetto. Sometimes the camp prisoners tried to fight back by taking some of the weapons and killing the SS officers, but the SS officers found out before they could actually go through with their plan and attack them. But on the plus side, more than 300 prisoners did get the chance to escape. But most of them were tracked down by the SS officers, and killed. Eventually the camp was shut down, and nobody came out