The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 throughout the territory of the Polish Republic, both in the areas annexed in 1939, and in the General Government formed by Nazi Germany in the central part of the country (see map). After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, a much greater system of camps was established, including the world's only industrial extermination camps constructed specifically to carry out the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
German-occupied Poland contained 457 camp complexes. Some of the major concentration and slave labour camps consisted of dozens of subsidiary camps scattered over a broad area. At the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, the number of subcamps was 97. The Auschwitz camp complex (Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz) had 48 satellite camps; their detailed descriptions are provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. List of Subcamps of KL Auschwitz (Podobozy KL Auschwitz). The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland (Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu), 1999–2010 Stutthof concentration camp had 40 subcamps officially and as many as 105 subcamps in operation, some as far as Elbląg, Bydgoszcz and Toruń, at a distance of from the main camp. The camp system was one of the key instruments of terror, while at the same time providing necessary labour for the German war economy.
The camp system was one of the key instruments of terror, while at the same time providing necessary labour for the German war economy. Historians estimate that some 5 million Polish citizens (including Polish Jews) went through them. Impartial scientific research into prisoner statistics became possible only after the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, because in the preceding decades all inhabitants of the eastern half of the country annexed by the USSR in 1939 were described as citizens of the Soviet Union in the official communist statistics.
Overview Before the September 1939 Invasion of Poland, the concentration camps built in Nazi Germany held mainly German Jews and political enemies of the Nazi regime. Everything changed dramatically with the onset of World War II. The Nazi concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, KL or KZ) set up across the entire German-occupied Europe were redesigned to exploit the labor of foreign captives and prisoners of war at high mortality rate for maximum profit. Millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the German war effort. According to research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nazi Germany created some 42,500 camps and ghettos in which an estimated 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned. All types of confinement were used as a source of labour supply.
Between 1941 and 1943, the concerted effort to destroy the European Jews entirely led to the creation of extermination camps by the SS for the sole purpose of mass murder in gas chambers. During the Holocaust, many transit camps as well as newly formed Jewish ghettos across German occupied Poland served as collection points for deportation under the guise of "resettlement". The unsuspecting victims used to mistakenly perceive their own deportations as work summons.. Pamięć Miejsca. Retrieved 20 May 2015. The Germans turned Auschwitz into a major death camp by expanding its extermination facilities. It was only after the majority of Jews from all Nazi ghettos were annihilated that the cement gas chambers and crematoria were blown up in a systematic attempt to hide the evidence of genocide. The cremation ovens working around the clock till November 25, 1944, were blown up at Auschwitz by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland. 13 September 2005, Internet Archive.
Extermination camps
The vision of the Final Solution had crystallised in the minds of the Nazi leadership during a five-week period, from 18 September to 25 October 1941. It coincided with the German victories on the Eastern Front which yielded over 500,000 new POWs near Moscow.David Glantz, Jonathan House, (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. University Press of Kansas. , p. 343. During this time, the concept of Hitler's Lebensraum was redefined. Different methods of industrial-scale murder were tested and the sites of the extermination camps were selected.
The new extermination policy was spelled out at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin in January 1942, leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp" thereafter. In early 1942 the German Nazi government constructed killing facilities in the territory of occupied Poland for the secretive Operation Reinhard. The extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) were added to already functioning extermination through labor systems, including at Auschwitz Konzentrationslager and Majdanek; both operating in a dual capacity until the end of the war. In total, the Nazi German death factories (Vernichtungs- oder Todeslager) designed to systematically murder trainloads of people by gassing under the guise of a shower, included the following: {|width="99%" border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="font-size: 90%; border: gray solid 1px; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: middle;" |- | style="background:#f2f2f8; font-size:85%;" colspan=5 | |- ! style="text-align:center;background:#B0C4DE"| ! style="text-align:center;background:#B0C4DE"|Vernichtungslager ! style="text-align:center;background:#B0C4DE"|Nazi-delineated territory ! style="text-align:center;background:#B0C4DE"|Polish location ! style="text-align:center;background:#B0C4DE"|Holocaust victims |- |1 | ||Oberschlesien ||Oświęcim near Kraków ||align="left"|1.1 million, around 90 percent Jewish.Data sources: Rees, Laurence (2005). Auschwitz: A New History. New York: Public Affairs. , p. 298. Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. , p. 383. |- |2 |Treblinka * ||Generalgouvernement ||80 km north-east of Warsaw ||align="left"|800,000–900,000 at Camp II (and 20,000 at Camp I).Holocaust Encyclopedia, . United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. |- |3 |Belzec * ||Generalgouvernement ||Bełżec near Tomaszów Lubelski ||align="left"| 600,000 with 246,922 from General Government. |- |4 |Sobibor * ||Generalgouvernement || ||align="left"|200,000 (140,000 from Lublin and 25,000 from Lwów).Raul Hilberg (1985), The Destruction of the European Jews by Yale University Press, p. 1219. . |- |5 |Chełmno ||Reichsgau Wartheland ||50 km north of Łódź ||align="left"|200,000 (most via the Łódź Ghetto). |- |6 |Majdanek ||Generalgouvernement ||Lublin city district at present ||align="left"|130,000 per Majdanek State Museum research. |- | style="font-size:85%;" colspan=5 | * Killing factories of secretive Operation Reinhard, 194243
The primary function of death camps was the murder of Jews from all countries occupied by Germany, except the Soviet Union (Soviet Jews were generally murdered by death squads). Non-Jewish Poles and other prisoners were also murdered in these camps; an estimated 75,000 non-Jewish Poles were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most extermination camps had regular concentration camps set up along with them including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Treblinka I. However, these camps were distinct from the adjoining extermination camps.Moshe Lifshitz, "Zionism". (ציונות), p. 304; (in) Trapped in a Nightmare by Cecylia Ziobro Thibault, .
Concentration camps
At the beginning of the war, the new Stutthof concentration camp near Gdańsk served exclusively for the internment and extermination of the Polish elites. Before long, it became a nightmare of Moloch with 105 subcamps extending as far as 200 kilometres south into the heartland of Poland and more than 60,000 dead before the war's end, mainly non-Jewish Poles. As far as forced labour, there was little difference between camp categories in Poland except for the level of punitive actions. Some camps were built so that the prisoners could be worked to death out of the public eye; this policy was called Vernichtung durch Arbeit (annihilation through work). Large numbers of non-Jewish Poles were held in these camps, as were various prisoners from other countries. Among the major concentration camps run by SS for the purpose of wilful killing of forced labourers, the most notable examples included the Soldau concentration camp in Działdowo, and the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp made famous in the feature film Schindler's List and the Inheritance documentary.
The Gross-Rosen concentration camp located in Rogoźnica, Poland (part of the German Silesia in World War II), was surrounded by a network of 97 satellite camps (Aussenlager) populated with Polish nationals expelled from Nazi Wartheland in the process of ethnic cleansing. By October 1943, most inmates were Polish Jews including nearly 26,000 women. There were similar camps, built locally, at Budzyń, Janowska, Poniatowa, Skarżysko-Kamienna (HASAG), Starachowice, Trawniki and Zasław servicing Nazi German startups which ballooned during this period. War profiteers set up camps in the vicinity of the ghettos via Arbeitsamt, as in Siedlce, the Mińsk Ghetto (Krupp), and numerous other towns with virtually nothing to eat.Edward Kopówka (translated from the Polish by Dobrochna Fire), The Jews in Siedlce 1850–1945. Chapter 2: The Extermination of Siedlce Jews. The Holocaust, pp. 137–167. Yizkor Book Project. Note: the testimonials from young children beyond their level of competence, such as G. Niewiadomski's (age 13) and similar others, quoted by the author from H. Grynberg (), are intentionally omitted for the sake of reliability. Retrieved via Internet Archive on 30 October 2015.
War economy of Nazi Germany
Following the failure of the Blitzkrieg strategy on the Eastern Front, the year 1942 marked the turning point in the German "total war" economy. The use of slave labour increased massively. About 12 million people, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were interned for the purpose of labour exploitation inside Nazi Germany. See also: Millions of camp inmates were used virtually for free by major German corporations such as Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Bosch, Blaupunkt, Daimler-Benz, Demag, Henschel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Philips, Siemens, and even Volkswagen, not to mention the German subsidiaries of foreign firms, such as Fordwerke (Ford Motor Company) and Adam Opel AG (a subsidiary of General Motors) among others.Sohn-Rethel, Alfred Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, CSE Books, 1978 The foreign subsidiaries were seized and nationalized by the Nazis. Work conditions deteriorated rapidly. The German need for slave labour grew to the point that even the foreign children have been kidnapped in an operation called the Heuaktion in which 40,000 to 50,000 Polish children aged 10 to 14 were used as slave labour. More than 2,500 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era, including Deutsche Bank. See also: