Madison Pierce

Mr. Hawkins
Modern World History -- P, Period 6
10 April 2016
Expansion of the Concentration Camp System
Concentration camps were the deadliest and most cruel extension to the holocaust. When
National Socialism was established this idea of death camps came into place. When the name was set
these systems of camps were looked over the observation of normal standards applying to arrest and
custody. These death camps were established to detain political opponents of the regime, and later became
the sole location to murder and slave Jews, Jehovahs Witnesses, Social Communists, Socialists trade
unionists, and other from liberal circles.
The ideas of concentration camps werent made a reality until 1933 when Hitler came into power.
The Nazis began establishing a complex network of camps expressly for the imprisonment of
enemies of their Regime (HoloCenter1). In the spring of 1933, the SS established
Dachau concentration camp, which came to serve as a model for an expanding and centralized
concentration camp system under SS management (HoloEncyc1). The German Security Police had
exclusive authority to arrest, execute, release and other official disciplinary order. In the first year of the
holocaust camp establishment, about 10, 000 opponents of the government were taken into custody but
none were Jews. In the 1930s, Germanys Jews ,some 500,000 people, made up less than one percent of
the German population, The general roundup of Jews did not start until late 1938. The Jews, they
claimed, had done much to spread defeatism and thus destroy the German army. Democracy in the
Weimar Republic, they argued, was a form of governance that had been imposed on Germany and
was unsuited to the German nature and way of life. They construed the terms of the Versailles
peace treaty and the steep compensation payments that it entailed as revenge by the victors and a
glaring injustice (HoloCenter2). The years before 1939 were merely the rookie year of the concentration
camps, getting them ready and testing them before the real enemy was captured. At first, the

concentration camp system had many programs lead by head SS officers but as the years went by these
programs gradually switched their head officers when the years of the Jew encapturement began. During
1934, Reichsfhrer SS (SS chief) Heinrich Himmler centralized those camps that held prisoners
under orders of protective custody (Schutzhaft) under an agency called the Inspectorate of
Concentration Camps (Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager; IKL). Himmler appointed Dachau
concentration camp commander Theodor Eicke as chief of the IKL. In 1939, Richard Glcks
replaced Eicke as Inspector of Concentration Camps; he held this position until 1945 (HoloEncyc2).
Over the years, as this was we first program regarding the administrative side of the SS concentration
camps IKL formed the highest of places to be. Subordinate to the SS Main Office from 1934 until
1939 and the SS Operations Main Office from 1939 until early 1942, the IKL became a department
of the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office in March 1942 (HoloEncyc3). The IKL was
responsible for the concentration camp prisoner from the moment a prisoner entered camp until the
moment the prisoner died in the camp. The camp commandant and the SS Death's-Head Battalion
personnel were responsible for constant unofficial cruelty that often led and was intended to lead to
unofficial killings. The concentration camp system, including its prisoners and its guards, was only
subject to review by any judicial or administrative authorities by the SS and police under the SS.

Based on an the special jurisdiction by Hitler as Fhrer, the concentration camp literally stood
outside the laws of the German state.
Over the 10 year span between 1930 and 1940 concentration camp expansion became
easier and easier to do. As Germany annexed territories in 1938 and 1939 from Austria and
Czechoslovakia, it built new camps and prisons in those areas. Once World War II began in 1939,
German conquests led to construction of all kinds of camps in Poland (HoloCenter3). Over 500,000
Jews and other prisoners were arrested in 1939, this was the year most jews were looking for immigration
out of germany but few actually made it through because of officers, german companies, immigration
threatened and persecuted most looking for immigration as political threats. Beginning of the

deportation of about 95,000 Jews from the federal territory Danzig (Stralsund, Scheidemuhl,
Stettin), as well as from Vienna, Maehrisch-Ostrau, Brno, and Prague to the "Federal territory
Lublinland." The brutality of the deportations from Stettin causes a sensation in the foreign
press(HoloCent1). Within these years many other arrest were made to fill all these camps, and
enventually get more money to construct more camps. Within Germany 51,000 laborers and 40,000
foreign laborers are arrested during the last six months of 1941 because of "work stoppages" or
"breach of labor contracts."(HoloCent2). By mid year of 1941, SS decided that concentration camps
should now be used in order to help the war effort. Camps were becoming harsher on their prisoners,
finding more ways to kill prisoners, and more reason to work them. The commander of the camp at
Emsland, reporting to the justice administration, orders that "passive resistance" is to be broken
by "direct force" (i.e., punished by beatings)..and "Aktion 14 F 13" (also known as
"Invalidenaktion," i.e., program for the handicapped): First documented proof of the murder of
specially picked "handicapped" concentration camp prisoners in an extermination facility of the
"Euthanasia" Program (HoloCenter3). After 1938 and well into World War II, concentration camp
labor was deployed in producing construction materials for actual SS-managed construction projects
including the expansion of existing camps and the construction of new camps.
Over the time span of the holocaust about six million foreign slave laborers, about two million
foreign prisoners of war, and about 750,000 predominantly foreign prisoners in concentration camps were
found on German territory. The expansion of concentration camps was the major killer of this terrible
time for our war, and was also the one most manipulated, most used in propaganda, in order to kill some 9
million people that were considered a threat to a pure race. All this ideology stemming from on man
named Adolf Hitler. One ironic fact about him is that he was a vegetarian, because he viewed that
slaughtering animals and eating them was inhumane. But taking the time to organize, construct ,and fund
twenty three concentration camps which starved, beat, raped, worked to death, experimented on and
unjustifiably killed people, human beings, did not appear inhumane to him and many other SS officials.

Have to hand it to him, his expanding concentration camp system did do some damage, but hes wrong if
he thinks we will recuperate quitely.