Prisoners-Of-War and Concentration Camp Money of the Twentiet... by Lance K. Campbell

ĭuring the First World War, eight to nine million prisoners of war were held in prisoner-of-war camps, some of them at locations which were later the sites of Nazi camps, such as Theresienstadt and Mauthausen. The German Empire also established concentration camps during the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1907) the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps. Although the word 'concentration camp' has acquired the connotation of murder because of the Nazi concentration camps, the British camps in South Africa did not involve systematic murder. Museums commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime have been established at many of the former camps and the Nazi concentration camp system has become a universal symbol of violence and terror.Ĭoncentration camps are conventionally held to have been invented by the British during the Second Boer War, but historian Dan Stone argues that there were precedents in other countries and that camps were 'the logical extension of phenomena that had long characterized colonial rule'. Following Allied military victories, the camps were gradually liberated in 19, although hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in the death marches. Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment.

After the beginning of World War II, people from German-occupied Europe were imprisoned in the concentration camps. Initially, most prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany, but as time went on different groups were arrested, including 'habitual criminals', ' asocials', and Jews. Following the 1934 purge of the SA, the concentration camps were run exclusively by the SS via the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office.

The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Color-coded by date of establishment as a main camp: blue for 1933–1937, gray for 1938–1939, red for 1940–1941, green for 1942, yellow for 1943–1944.įrom 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps ( German: Konzentrationslager ), including subcamps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. Class=notpageimage| All of the main camps except Arbeitsdorf, Herzogenbusch, Niederhagen, Kauen, Kaiserwald, and Vaivara (1937 borders).

Prisoners-Of-War and Concentration Camp Money of the Twentiet... by Lance K. Campbell