Skip to main content

Search the Holocaust Encyclopedia

Trending keywords:
SS chief Heinrich Himmler (front row, left) and Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis (second from left) inspect the Mauthausen concentration ...

SS and the Camp System

In 1933-1934, SS chief Heinrich Himmler secured SS control over a centralized concentration camp system.

Throughout Germany, various civilian authorities and police agencies had established concentration camps during 1933 to incarcerate political enemies of the Nazi government. Impressed with the Dachau concentration camp established by the SS in March 1933, Hitler authorized Himmler to centralize these camps under SS leadership. Himmler established (in the SS Main Office) an SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps under the leadership of Dachau camp commandant and SS General Theodor Eicke.

After 1934, SS officers commanded all concentration camps in Germany and in German-occupied territory. Units known as SS Death's-Head Units (SS-Totenkopfverbände) guarded and administered the camps. Although the Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) had exclusive authority to incarcerate, release, and “officially” order the execution of prisoners, the daily life of prisoners lay in the brutal and merciless hands of the camp commandants and these SS Death's-Head Units, which were not part of the police forces.

In 1937, there were only four concentration camps in Germany; by 1944, there were approximately 30 main camps and hundreds of subcamps located throughout the Greater German Reich and German-occupied Europe.

Camp System: Maps

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). The perpetrators used these sites for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people thought to be enemies of the state, and mass murder.

  • Nazi concentration camps, 1933–34

    The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. The Storm Troopers (SA) and the police established concentration camps beginning in February 1933. These camps were set up to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged political opponents. They were established on the local level throughout Germany. Gradually, most of these early camps were disbanded and replaced by centrally organized concentration camps under the exclusive jurisdiction of the SS (Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state). Dachau was the only concentration camp opened in 1933 that remained in operation until 1945, and was the model for the Nazi concentration camp system that replaced the earlier camps.

  • Nazi concentration camps, 1933–39

    The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. The Storm Troopers (SA) and the police established concentration camps to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged political opponents of the regime. These camps were established on the local level throughout Germany. Gradually, most of these early camps were disbanded and replaced by centrally organized concentration camps under the exclusive jurisdiction of the SS (Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state). By 1939, seven large concentration camps had been established. Besides Dachau, they were Sachsenhausen (1936) north of Berlin, Buchenwald (1937) near Weimar, Neuengamme (1938) near Hamburg, Flossenbürg (1938), Mauthausen (1938), and Ravensbrück (1939).

  • Nazi camps in occupied Poland, 1939-1945
  • Killing Centers in German-occupied Poland, 1942

    Killing centers (also referred to as "extermination camps" or "death camps") were designed to carry out genocide. Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis established five killing centers in German-occupied Poland—Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (part of the Auschwitz camp complex). Chelmno and Auschwitz were established in areas annexed to Germany in 1939. The other camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) were established in the General Government (an administrative unit of occupied Poland). Auschwitz functioned as concentration and forced-labor camps, as well as a killing center. The overwhelming majority of the victims of the killing centers were Jews. An estimated 2.7 million Jews were killed in these five killing centers as part of the Final Solution. Other victims murdered in the killing centers included Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war.

    On this map, the Majdanek camp is labeled as a killing center. In the past, many scholars counted the Majdanek camp (located just outside the city of Lublin) as a sixth killing center. However, based on newer research, Lublin-Majdanek is usually classified as a concentration camp. According to this research, German authorities used Majdanek primarily as a place to concentrate Jews who were being temporarily spared for use as forced laborers. Occasionally, especially after Belzec ceased operating in late 1942, Jews were sent to Majdanek as part of Operation Reinhard to undergo selection. Jews selected as unfit for labor were murdered at Lublin-Majdanek either by shooting or in the camp's gas chambers.

  • Major Nazi camps in Greater Germany, 1944

    The Nazi camp system expanded rapidly after the beginning of World War II in September 1939, as forced labor became important in war production. Labor shortages in the German war economy became critical after German defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943. This led to the increased use of concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in German armaments industries. Especially in 1943 and 1944, hundreds of subcamps were established in or near industrial plants. Subcamps were generally smaller camps administered by the main camps, which supplied them with the required number of prisoners. Camps such as Auschwitz in Poland, Buchenwald in central Germany, Gross-Rosen in eastern Germany, Natzweiler-Struthof in eastern France, Ravensbrueck near Berlin, and Stutthof near Danzig on the Baltic coast became administrative centers of huge networks of subsidiary forced-labor camps.

  • Major Nazi camps in Europe, January 1944

    Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Germans arrested those who resisted their domination and those they judged to be racially inferior or politically unacceptable. People arrested for resisting German rule were mostly sent to forced-labor or concentration camps. The Germans deported Jews from all over occupied Europe to extermination camps in Poland, where they were systematically killed, and also to concentration camps, where they were used for forced labor. Transit camps such as Westerbork, Gurs, Mechelen, and Drancy in western Europe and concentration camps like Bolzano and Fossoli di Carpi in Italy were used as collection centers for Jews, who were then deported by rail to the extermination camps. According to SS reports, there were more than 700,000 prisoners registered in the concentration camps in January 1945.

  • Major Nazi camps in Austria
  • Nazi camps in the Low Countries, 1940-1945
  • Major Nazi camps in Italy
  • Nazi camps in the Baltic Countries, 1941-1945
  • Major Nazi and Axis camps in southern Europe
  • Nazi camps in Norway and Denmark, 1940-1945
  • Liberation of major Nazi camps, 1944-1945

    As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives on Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, many of whom had survived death marches into the interior of Germany. Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching the Majdanek camp near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to demolish the camp in an effort to hide the evidence of mass murder. The Soviets also liberated major Nazi camps at Auschwitz, Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück. US forces liberated the Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen camps. British forces liberated camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen.

Before 1938, the vast majority of concentration camp prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime, while a minority of the prisoners were repeat criminal offenders, so-called asocials, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men and men accused of homosexuality, and Roma (Gypsies). Roma were often classified as “criminals” and/or “asocials.”

Although in reality most Roma in Germany were settled and somewhat integrated into German society, the SS and police treated them according to long-standing negative "Gypsy" stereotypes as petty criminals and persons who engaged in anti-social behavior. And with intensified police enforcement of Paragraph 175 (the statute criminalizing sexual relations between men), gay men and men accused of homosexuality were also often classified in the camps as “criminals” and “asocials.” 

Despite their presence in numbers vastly out of proportion to their percentage in the German population, Jews remained a minority among the prisoners prior to 1938. In most cases, Gestapo or Kripo officials incarcerated Jews in the camps because they had been activists in the Social Democratic, Communist, or liberal democratic parties, had been visible opponents of the Nazi Party or specific Nazi policies, or had been advocates of policies or members of organizations that the Nazis found to be “hostile to the state and the race.” 

With German expansion in 1938, the availability of prisoners for forced labor in the concentration camp system took on added significance. The SS was determined that the Thousand-Year Reich would be ruled by its self-selected, “racially pure” elite. To ensure this development, its leaders invested significant financial and human resources in planning for the construction of the German settlements in Poland and the Soviet Union in accordance with their visions of permanent German rule. As early as the mid-1930s, the SS leaders of the concentration camps and the chief of the SS Administration Main Office (SS-Verwaltungshauptamt), SS General Oswald Pohl, recognized the potential of concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers to produce construction materials, and eventually to do the manual labor to build and maintain these settlements.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler leads an inspection of the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Himmler at Mauthausen

SS chief Heinrich Himmler leads an inspection of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, April 27, 1941.

  • Bundesministerium fuer Inneres, Wien, Archiv des Oeffentlichen Denkmal

At this time, the SS founded a number of companies, such as the German Earth and Stone Works (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke; DESt) and the German Equipment Works (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke; DAW) to produce construction materials and equipment for the SS. The Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938), and Mauthausen (1938) concentration camp sites were chosen precisely because of their proximity to soil suitable for making bricks, to a brickworks factory, or to stone quarries. In 1938, the Criminal Police initiated two massive roundups of so-called “work-shy” and asocial individuals, in part to increase the concentration camp population available for forced labor. Among the so-called work-shy and asocials whom the Kripo incarcerated were Roma (Gypsies).

In the first three years of the war, the SS leaders expanded the concentration camp system not merely to detain the tens of thousands of new political prisoners of non-German nationality who chose to resist German occupation policies, but also to increase the pool of forced laborers available for the settlements that the SS planned to construct now that Poland and the western Soviet Union were in German hands. SS leaders reached decisions to construct new gigantic concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek (1941-1942) based on expectations of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war who would be available for forced labor (1941) and, later, on tens of thousands of Jewish forced laborers (January-March 1942).

After spring 1942, the overwhelming majority of prisoners in both Auschwitz and Majdanek (until November 1943) were Jews. In April 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau took on the function of a killing center. Until November 1943, Lublin-Majdanek served primarily as a forced-labor camp for Jews within the framework of Operation Reinhard. Majdanek also served the SS from time to time as a killing site, where the SS and police killed Jews under Operation Reinhard.

In winter 1942, it became clear that Germany would be engaged in a long war and that labor needs for German war production could not be met even by the deportation of millions of civilian forced laborers from occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union. After this time, the leadership of the SS administration and the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps deployed concentration camp labor, at a profit, in accordance with contracts signed by German military and civilian agencies and private firms producing armaments, related war materials (e.g. uniforms), and construction materials to repair or replace facilities destroyed by Allied bombing. To facilitate this process, Himmler incorporated the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, now led by SS General Richard Glücks, with the SS Economic-Administration Main Office (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt-WVHA) under Pohl in March 1942.

Henceforth, the concentration camps and their prisoners, the SS-owned companies, and the administrative offices of the SS were all together in one agency. Under the auspices of the WVHA, the number of subcamps multiplied into the hundreds and even thousands. Enterprises using concentration camp labor ranged from large state combines like the Hermann-Göring-Werke and large, private corporate conglomerates like the I.G. Farben chemical combine to small private firms like Oskar Schindler's German Enamelware Factory (Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik) in Krakow, Poland.

During World War II, SS camp authorities would kill around two million prisoners—Jews, political prisoners, Roma (Gypsies), so-called asocials, recidivist convicts, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and others—in the concentration camp system.

Last Edited: Aug 21, 2023
Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Critical Thinking Questions

  • Research what pressures and motivations might have influenced members of the SS.
  • How does the SS embody the systematic nature of the attempted “Final Solution?”
  • What other institutions and professions collaborated with the SS to operate the camp system?
  • What other institutions and groups in society benefited from the camp system?
  • In what ways did the SS coordinate the activities of German and foreign police agencies to persecute perceived "enemies of the state"?
  • Did the outside world have any knowledge about the camps? If so, what, if any, actions were taken by other governments and their officials?

Thank you for supporting our work

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, EVZ, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.

Glossary

Full Glossary