The 10 Most Infamous WWII Concentration Camps

One of the most well-known policies made by the Nazi government during World War II was government-operated concentration camps. These camps were initially designated for political prisoners—real or perceived threats to the state. However, starting in the 1940s, the Nazi government instituted Operation Reinhard, which was the systematic detention and murder of European Jews.

A prison camp is a facility for the detention of lawfully detained criminals who have been convicted of a crime through fair judicial process. A refugee camp is a facility to house persons who were displaced by a natural disaster or political crisis that made their home area unsafe. A concentration camp houses people who were neither judicially processed nor displaced. Instead, those detained in a concentration camp were seized without judicial process and typically considered “enemies of the state” either due to political or ethnic affiliation .

Many authoritarian governments continue to employ the use of concentration camps for detaining perceived enemies of the state and “undesirables.” The U.S. unlawfully detained Japanese Americans during World War II, placing them in what we now acknowledge as concentration camps. The Soviet Union—a country the U.S. government was happy to ally with or vilify depending on what suited them most at that moment—maintained several concentration camps known as GULAGs throughout its existence.

When we think of World War II concentration camps, we typically think of Nazi Germany despite many other countries at the time having similar facilities. This association is due to the slaughter and horror that was occurring in Nazi concentration camps. Although we can acknowledge the human rights abuses by the U.S., Soviet Union, and China at the time, we do not want to detract from the grievous genocide that occurred in Nazi territories. Thus, we only selected Nazi locations.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

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The Oświęcim area of Poland was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1939, shortly before the introduction of Operation Reinhard. The Nazis added Poland to what they referred to as the General Government and split Poland into districts. Auschwitz is the German name for the area. The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest of its kind. It consisted of three total camps and included a killing center. The camps were opened between 1940 and 1942, named Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II, and Auschwitz III. More than 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, with some 1.3 million total having been deported to the camp. 1 million of those killed at Auschwitz were Jews.

Auschwitz was unique from other Nazi concentration camps because it had a concentration camp, labor camp, and killing center all in one facility. The gas chamber center and crematoria were located at the Birkenau section of the camp and were constructed for the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible, as fast as possible. Auschwitz prisoners were primarily of Jewish descent. However, there were also non-Jewish Poles, Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, and people of other nationalities imprisoned here.

Almost 1.1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Of those, at least 960,000 were killed. Non-Jewish Poles made up around 140,000–150.000 prisoners and 74,000 of them died. Roma made up 23,000 prisoners and 21,000 of them were killed. Registered Soviet POWs made up 15,000 prisoners; all of them were killed. 25,000 people of other nationalities were also deported to Auschwitz of which 10,000–15,000 died. The Auschwitz camp and remaining prisoners were liberated by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.

Treblinka

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Located in the Warsaw District of Nazi Germany’s General Government within German-occupied Poland, Treblinka was one of three killing centers constructed at the beginning of Operation Reinhard. The goal when opening these facilities was to murder two million European Jews. The Nazis began by establishing the labor camp, Treblinka I, in 1941. At first, Treblinka I also served as a labor education camp for non-Jewish Poles that the Germans believed had violated their labor discipline laws. The killing center, Treblinka II, was constructed in the summer of 1942. It was the third killing center established by the Nazi Party, and its construction and operations were overseen by the authorities in charge of implementing Operation Reinhard.

Deportations to the Treblinka camp were primarily from the ghettos of the Warsaw and Radom Districts of the General Government. Between late July and September of 1942, the Germans deported around 265,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. Then, between August and November of 1942, SS and police authorities in German-occupied Poland deported another 346,000 Jews from the Bialystok District, attached to German East Prussia. There were also around 33,000 Jews transported in from the Lublin District.

Killing started almost immediately and from July 1942 until September 1943, the Nazi party was able to murder around 925,000 Jews at Treblinka. An unknown number of Poles, Romani, and Soviet POWs also died at this camp. The Nazis ordered that Treblinka II be shut down and dismantled in 1943.

Bełżec

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The first killing center authorized and constructed by the Nazi party was Bełżec . Like previous camps, Bełżec was designed for the explicit purpose of ending human lives and exterminating the European Jews. Construction for the camp began in November 1941, at the beginning of Operation Reinhard. Deportations to Bełżec began in March 1942. Jews from various locations within the General Government were deported to Bełżec where they were promptly murdered in gas chambers. The gas chambers used carbon monoxide gas produced by large diesel engines to flood sealed rooms filled with people, killing them by asphyxiation.

Bełżec was both the first killing center to open and also the first one to shut down when the Germans ordered the center be dismantled in December 1942. By the time the camp closed, after less than a year of operation, approximately 434,500 Jews were murdered at Bełżec alone. The killing center was constructed at the site where a forced labor camp had been located, a little over 1,600 feet from the Bełżec railway station. The camp was relatively close to both the cities of Lublin and Lviv, which had significant Jewish populations.

Initially, the Germans sent Polish workers to build the camp’s barracks and eventually replaced them with Jewish forced laborers, many of whom were skilled carpenters. Basic installations for the facility were in place by 1942. The first prisoners, including the forced laborers who built the camp, were killed in a series of experimental gassings. The initial killings mirrored the killing centers of the T4 “euthanasia” program, using bottled, chemically-produced carbon monoxide gas. However, the first commandant of the camp, Christian Wirth, had experience with the T4 program and ordered a self-contained installation that generated carbon monoxide from a large automotive engine. This technique would be replicated at other Operation Reinhard camps.

Majdanek

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On a visit to Lublin in July 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS and police leader of Lublin to construct a concentration camp to supply forced labor for construction materials and projects for future, permanent settlements in Poland and the Soviet Union. The eventual site chosen was near the suburb of Majdan-Tatarski (Majdanek means “little Majdan”.) Construction began in October 1941, followed by the arrival of around 2,000 Soviet POWs. Then, in mid-October 1941, Himmler instructs the staff at Majdanek to implement Operation Reinhard at the camp. On 12 December 1941, Majdanek officially became a forced labor camp primarily for Jews under the tenets of Operation Reinhard.

150 Jews were then seized from the streets of Lublin and deported to Majdanek to become the first set of forced laborers at the camp. In February 1942, the first non-Jewish Polish prisoners arrived at Majdanek, along with more Jewish prisoners from the Lublin ghetto. Majdanek operated for almost three years, killing between 95,000 and 130,000 people. 80,000–110,000 of those deaths occurred at the main part of the Majdanek camp. The majority of the prisoners at the camp were Jews and they represented the overwhelming majority of deaths there, with between 60,000 and 72,000 Jews known to have died at the main camp alone.

Majdanek was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in 1944. As the Soviet army advanced, the Nazis began rapidly killing off or evacuating the forced laborers, destroying their records, and dismantling the camps. However, the rapid advance of the Soviets into the area prevented the Nazis from destroying Majdanek. Still, by the time the Soviets arrived less than 500 prisoners were left in the camp out of over 100,000 deported to the location.

Chełmno

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Chełmno is a particularly haunting site regarding the systematic mass murder of European Jews, not because of the number of people killed there, but because it was the first stationary facility where poison gas was implemented as a tool for killing. Previous gassings had been done with bottled gas in facilities designed to be constructed and dismantled easily. However, Chełmno was the first time the Nazi party felt confident enough to build a stationary, permanent gassing facility for killing off the prisoners. The camp consisted of an unused estate in the village of Chełmno and a large forest clearing approximately 2.5 miles northwest of the village, off the east side of the road to Kolo and near the village of Rzuchow to the south.

Killing at Chełmno began on 8 December 1941. SS and police officials would transport them by truck to the grounds of the castle at Chełmno. There they were told that they were being sent to Germany as forced laborers but that they needed to bathe and have their clothes disinfected first.

The naked prisoners would be sent to a large paneled truck that could 50–70 persons. The doors were closed and sealed. Then, the mechanic on duty would attach a tube to the van’s exhaust pipe and start the engine, pumping the sealed space full of carbon monoxide. Any prisoners found alive at the forest camp were shot to death by the officer.

At least 172,000 people were killed at Chełmno between December 1941 and March 1943 and in June and July 1944. The evidence of the killing was largely destroyed by a detachment of forced laborers who were made to exhume the bodies and cremate them. More than half of these laborers were then shot by the officers overseeing them.

Sobibór

Sobibór is one of the three facilities constructed by the Nazis for the express purpose of murdering European Jews. The staff at Sobibór were largely officers with experience from the T4 “euthanasia” program in Germany. The camp was located west of the Sobibór railway station. The Nazis constructed a connection from the station to the camp to offload incoming prisoner transports. The area was densely forested and branches were woven into the barbed wire fences, which protected the camp from public view. At its largest extension, Sobibór was 1,312 by 1,969 feet, larger than 33 soccer fields. A 50-feet-wide minefield surrounded the camp to prevent escape.

Deportations to Sobibór occurred between May 1942 and the fall of 1943. Between July and September of 1942, deportations by rail were suspended while repairs were made on the Chelm-Lublin railway. The primary deportees were Jews from the northern and eastern regions of Lublin. However, there were also prisoners from German-occupied Soviet territory, Germany itself, Austria, Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, the Netherlands, and France.

Killing at Sobibór began swiftly and at least 167,000 people died at this camp.

Dachau

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The Dachau concentration camp was the longest-operating concentration camp established by the Nazi Party. It was first established in March 1933 as the first regular concentration camp under the Nazis. Dachau would later become the standard by which all other Nazi concentration camps were modeled and held against. Due to its notoriety and perceived effectiveness by the Nazis, it served as a training center for SS concentration camp staff and guards. The number of prisoners held at Dachau was massive, perhaps not as massive as Auschwitz, but no less significant. Around 200,000 prisoners passed through Dachau between 1933 and 1945, and it’s believed that around 40,000 died.

The initial prisoners at Dachau were German communists, social democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. Other prisoners were integrated over time, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romani people, gay men, repeat criminal offenders, and “asocials” or “work-shy” people. “Asocials” were anyone unable or unwilling to seek gainful employment within the strict framework set forth by the Nazis. During the early years of Dachau’s operations, relatively few Jews were interned there. Any Jews imprisoned at Dachau in the early years needed to fall into one of the above categories or have completed a prison sentence for violating the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

As the persecution of Jews in Nazi territories increased, so, too, did the number of Jews interned at Dachau. Once the deportation of German Jews to ghettos and killing centers located in the German-occupied territories began, the Jewish population of Dachau increased dramatically. When other concentration camps were liberated by the Allied forces, the Nazis would evacuate them on foot in death marches, taking them to Dachau and other camps within the German borders.

Mauthausen

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In 1938, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, SS General Oswald Pohl, and SS General Theodore Eicke then began inspections to build a concentration camp in Austria. Upper Austrian Nazi Party district leader, August Eigruber, stated his intent to incarcerate “traitors to the people from all over Austria” at this camp. They decided on a location on the bank of the Danube River. The location was near the Wiener Graben stone quarry, which was then owned by the city of Vienna. It was about 3 miles from the town of Mauthausen in Upper Austria. In April of 1938, the SS founded a company known as the German Earth and Stone Works Inc., to exploit the granite they intended to mine using concentration camp labor.

In August of 1938, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps transferred approximately 300 prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp to Mauthausen . Most of these prisoners were Austrian and virtually all were people whom the Nazi regime had branded “asocials.” Mauthausen camp authorities killed specially targeted groups of persons sent to Mauthausen for the express purpose of being murdered. They also killed any inmates they deemed too weak or sick to work. Several killing methods were used at this camp.

Mauthausen authorities began using gas to kill prisoners sometime between 1941 and 1942. Eventually, the camp was equipped with stationary gas chambers with the capacity to kill up to 80 people simultaneously using Zyklon B (prussic acid.) Additionally, pseudoscientific experiments were conducted on prisoners. Notably, Hermann Richter, a camp physician, would surgically remove significant organs, such as the liver, from living prisoners. He did this for the sole purpose of determining how long the prisoners could survive without those organs. An estimated 197,464 prisoners passed through Mauthausen and at least 95,000 died. More than 14,000 of those killed were Jewish.

Bergen-Belsen

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The camp known as Bergen-Belsen began as a Nazi camp for Allied prisoners of war. After being turned over to the SS in 1943, it became a concentration camp. Due to the designation as both a prisoner-of-war camp and a concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen occupied a unique space within the Nazi facility hierarchy. Beginning in 1944, the SS deported large numbers of prisoners from other concentration camps further east to Bergen-Belsen. These prisoners were often evacuated on foot and forced to march to the camp. Many died during these death marches. Bergen-Belsen’s resources were scarce, as were the resources at other camps since the Allies were quickly advancing on Germany. In July 1944, the camp had 7,300 prisoners. By 15 April 1945, that number had ballooned to over 60,000 prisoners.

Due to overcrowding, scarce resources, and poor living conditions, death became a common occurrence for prisoners. Disease and starvation took the lives of tens of thousands. Between May 1943 and April 1945, somewhere between 36,400 and 37,600 prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen. Liberation wasn’t enough to save all of them. Around 13,000 prisoners were so sick and malnourished, that they were unable to recover. These prisoners died shortly after being freed by the British forces.

Due to the widespread typhus infection that ravaged the camp, the British authorities deemed Bergen-Belsen a biohazard. Thus, they burned the whole camp to the ground to prevent the spread of typhus. This camp is especially notable as the last known location of Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

Buchenwald

While Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp, it was not within German borders. The largest concentration camp built within the borders of Nazi Germany was Buchenwald . The camp was constructed in 1937 in a wooded area on the northern slopes of Ettersberg, north of Weimar. Before the Nazis rose to power, this area was primarily associated with literary legend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It is also the birthplace of German constitutional democracy. Prisoners at Buchenwald lived in the main camp, which was surrounded by an electrified, barbed wire fence and watchtowers, and had sentries armed with automatic machine guns.

The “Bunker” was Buchenwald’s punishment block. It was located at the entrance to the main camp. Prisoners who violated the camp regulations were taken to the bunker where they were punished and often tortured to death. Until 1943, Buchenwald was an exclusively male prison. Women were introduced in 1943 and the female prisoner population increased dramatically in 1944. Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, arrested for opposing the Nazi party. One of the most prominent prisoners was Ernst Thälmann, chairman of the German Communist Party. He was kept in the camp until 1944 when he was murdered.

After Kristallnacht in 1938, almost 10,000 Jewish prisoners were sent to Buchenwald. Over 250 of the newly arrested Jewish prisoners died as a result of injuries from their initial arrest or from the severe mistreatment they endured upon arriving. Unlike other concentration camps, the German authorities never registered a lot of the prisoners at Buchenwald. So, we don’t have a clear idea of how many people died there. However, we know at least 56,000 male prisoners were killed, and at least 11,000 of those who died were Jews.

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