The role of concentration camps during the holocaust

What happened in concentration camps

Conditions were brutal and prisoners were often sent to the gas chambers or killed on site if they did not work quickly enough. Serge Klarsfeld, Paris, and Mr. The victims were stripped of their clothing and crowded into the gas chambers where they died of suffocation within a short time. Museums are thus playing an important role in making sure these stories still get told through artifacts like personal belongings, video testimonies and even as holograms. The war did not change the original function of the concentration camps as detention sites for the incarceration of political enemies. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they quickly moved to suppress all real and potential opposition. Majdanek began its gassings in October Murder operations began there on December 8, , and continued intermittently until January

Economic needs and the prolonging of the war established the need to utilize the Jews as a labor force. Six Extermination Camps I n Chelmno, the first extermination camp to be established with the single purpose of killing people — first of all Jews — in a systematic fashion,inmates were gassed to death using exhaust gas from trucks, in the period of December Marchand again from June-July Criminals were marked with green inverted triangles, political prisoners with red, "asocials" including Roma, nonconformists, vagrants, and other groups with black or—in the case of Roma in some camps—brown triangles.

Concentration camps also existed in Germany itself, and while they were not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many of their inmates perished because of harsh conditions or they were executed.

In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners. Homosexuals were identified with pink triangles and Jehovah's Witnesses with purple ones. There were also large numbers of Romani people, ethnic PolesSerbspolitical prisonershomosexualspeople with disabilities, Jehovah's WitnessesclergymenEastern European intellectuals and others including common criminals, as the Nazis declared.

Murder operations began there on December 8,and continued intermittently until January

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