Concentration Camps
"In the earliest years of the Third Reich, various central, regional, and local authorities in Germany established concentration camps to detain political opponents of the regime, including German Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and others from left and liberal political circles. 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.
From 1933, the concentration camp system, including its prisoners and its guards, was not subject to review by any judicial or administrative authorities outside of the SS and police apparatus. Based on an extra-legal jurisdiction authorized by Hitler as Führer, the concentration camp literally stood outside the laws of the German state. It was intended to serve as a detention center for persons whom the Nazi leaders deemed to be a subversive danger to the German race. Incarceration in a concentration camp was rarely linked to a specific crime or actual subversive activity; the SS and police ordered incarceration based on their suspicion that an individual person either had committed a crime or engaged in subversive activity or would likely commit a crime or engage in a subversive activity in the future."
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007387
"In the earliest years of the Third Reich, various central, regional, and local authorities in Germany established concentration camps to detain political opponents of the regime, including German Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and others from left and liberal political circles. 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.
From 1933, the concentration camp system, including its prisoners and its guards, was not subject to review by any judicial or administrative authorities outside of the SS and police apparatus. Based on an extra-legal jurisdiction authorized by Hitler as Führer, the concentration camp literally stood outside the laws of the German state. It was intended to serve as a detention center for persons whom the Nazi leaders deemed to be a subversive danger to the German race. Incarceration in a concentration camp was rarely linked to a specific crime or actual subversive activity; the SS and police ordered incarceration based on their suspicion that an individual person either had committed a crime or engaged in subversive activity or would likely commit a crime or engage in a subversive activity in the future."
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007387
Labor Camps
- After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazis opened forced labor camps where many people died of disease, exhaustion, starvation and brutal treatment. SS guards were in charge of watching the camps and maintaining order. These camps expanded so rapidly that Nazi doctors started performing medical experiments on prisoners. Most of the prisoners in these types of camps were men because most of the women had children and women with children were sent to the death camps because they wouldn't be able to do much labor. Prisoners in these types of camps were treated with much cruelty. Prisoners would do anything from heavy manual labor to working in coal mines.
Death Camps
- In order to kill Jews in great numbers, the Nazis created death camps in Poland. These camps were basically mass murder sites. Prisoners would either be burned in an oven, killed in a gas chamber, or simply shot. Up to 6,000 Jews could be gassed in one day. Jews were often taken to transit camps before they were taken to their final destination of the extermination camps. Once the Jews were either gassed or shot their bodies were taken to mass graves where bulldozers would sometimes run dirt over the grave to cover it up. Or sometimes the bodies would be piled up and burned.