Read Books Online Free | Alphabetical Index

Extermination camp

Extermination camp (German Vernichtungslager) was the name given to a group of camps set up by Nazi Germany during World War II, for the express purpose of killing the Jews of Europe, although members of some other groups whom the Nazis wished to exterminate, such as Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war, were also killed in these camps. This was part of the Holocaust: the programme to kill all the Jews of Europe. The German term Vernichtung (literally meaning "elimination") is a euphemism for killing; hence these camps are also known as death camps.

Extermination camps should be distinguished from concentration camps (such as Dachau and Belsen), which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and homosexuals). In the early years of the Nazi regime, many Jews were sent to these camps, but after 1942 all Jews were deported to the extermination camps.

They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. Many Jews were worked to death in these camps, but eventually the Jewish labor force, no matter how useful to the German war effort, was destined for extermination. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.

Most accounts of the Holocaust recognise six extermination camps, all located in occupied Poland. These were:

Of these, Auschwitz II and Chelmno were located within areas of western Poland annexed by Germany - the other four were located within the General Government area.

A seventh camp, much less well-known than these six, was located at Maly Trostenets, in present-day Belarus. The Croat Ustaše; puppet regime also operated an extermination camp at Jasenovac.

Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibór were constructed during Operation Reinhard, the code name for the systematic killing of the Jews of Europe, decided on at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 and carried out under the administrative control of Adolf Eichmann.

These camps, plus Chelmno, which had been built earlier, were pure extermination camps, built solely to kill vast numbers of Jews within hours of arrival. Despite this, many non-Jews were also killed in these camps, mostly (non-Jewish) Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.

The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas, usually in "gas chambers", although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except at Sobibór where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered.

The number of people killed at the six major camps has been estimated as follows:

This gives a total of at least 3,000,000, and possibly 3,500,000. Of these, over 90% were Jews. These six camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the whole Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.

As the Soviet armed forces advanced into Poland in 1944, the camps were closed and partly or completely dismantled to conceal what had taken place in them. The postwar Polish Communist government further partly dismantled the campsites, and generally allowed them to decay. Monuments of various kinds were erected at the camps, although these usually did not mention that the people killed in them were nearly all Jews.

After the fall of Communism in 1991, the camp sites became more accessible and have become centres of tourism, particularly at Auschwitz, the best-known of them. There has been a series of disputes between the Polish government and Jewish organisations about what is appropriate at these sites. Some Jewish groups have objected strongly to the erection of Christian memorials at the camps.

Further reading