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CENTRALIZATION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP SYSTEM

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CENTRALIZATION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP SYSTEM

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The SS gained its independence from the SA in July 1934, in the wake of the Röhm purge. Hitler then authorized SS chief leader Heinrich Himmler to centralize the administration of the concentration camps and formalize them into a system. Himmler chose SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke for this task.

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Already as commandant of Dachau in 1933, Eicke developed an organization and procedures to administer and guard a concentration camp. He issued regulations for the duties of the perimeter guards and for treatment of the prisoners. The organization, structure, and practice developed at Dachau in 1933–34 became the model for the Nazi concentration camp system as it expanded. Among Eicke's early trainees at Dachau was Rudolf Höss, who later commanded the Auschwitz concentration camp.

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The Nazis set up their first concentration camp, Dachau, in the wake of Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933. By the end of the war, 22 main concentration camps were established, together with around 1,200 affiliate camps, Aussenkommandos, and thousands of smaller camps. At the beginning, the first inmates in concentration camps were political opponents of the Nazi regime. concentration camp was not the same as an extermination camp – camps constructed with the specific purpose of mass murdering Jews and other victim groups.

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A typical concentration camp consisted of barracks that were secured from escape by barbed wire, watchtowers and guards. The inmates usually lived in overcrowded barracks and slept in bunk ”beds”. In the forced labour camps, for instance, the inmates usually worked 12 hours a day with hard physical work, clothed in rags, eating too little and always living under the risk of corporal punishment. The sick, the old and those who could not keep up with the work temp were “selected” and then killed with gas, injections or shot. Others were chosen for terrible pseudo-scientific experiments – most often losing their life.

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he Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright: Lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life". The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the "racially inferior," or "sexually deviant," as well as to "enemies of the state" both internal and external. From very early in the war, part of Nazi policy was to murder civilians en masse, especially targeting Jews. Later in the war, this policy grew into Hitler's "final solution", the complete extermination of the Jews. It began with Einsatzgruppen death squads in the East, which killed some 1,000,000 people in numerous massacres, and continued in concentration camps where prisoners were actively denied proper food and health care.

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The word “Holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the mass murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well as members of some other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War. To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution”–now known as the Holocaust–came to fruition under the cover of world war, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland.

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En 1933, la población judía de Europa ascendía a más de nueve millones, y la mayoría de los judíos europeos vivía en países que la Alemania nazi ocuparía o dominaría durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para el año 1945, los alemanes y sus colaboradores habían asesinado aproximadamente a dos de cada tres judíos europeos como parte de la "Solución final", la política nazi para asesinar a los judíos de Europa. Si bien las principales víctimas del racismo nazi fueron los judíos, a quienes consideraban el mayor peligro para Alemania, entre las otras víctimas se incluyen 200 mil romaníes (gitanos). Como mínimo, 200 mil pacientes discapacitados física o mentalmente, en su mayoría alemanes y que vivían en instituciones, fueron asesinados en el marco del llamado Programa de Eutanasia.