The German Concentration Camp System

The concentration camps were meant to arrest so-called "SchŠdlinge am deutschen Volkskšrper" ("People's delinquents") in order to eliminate them from society and educate them in a national socialist way. Therefore, the Nazis arrested without legal basis real or potential political opponents and people for racial, religious and other reasons.

The development of the KZ's can be divided into three periodes:

Special camps for political prisoners (1933-1936): Due to the apprehensions of early 1933, the SA installed so-called "Wilde Lager" ("Wild Camps") for mostly political and religious opponents. In March 1933, the SS erected Dachau concentration camp, which later became a model for other KZ'S and where the SS trained torture, and people in the techniques of domination . It was Dachau, where the implementation of prisoners within the administrative self-preservation and the labour assignment was developed..

The first victims for armament and war (1936-1941): New concentration camps (Buchenwald, Mauthausen, etc.) were founded in order to let the KZ- inmates work more and more as slave workers which was called "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" ("extermination by work").. In addition to criminals, Jehovas Witnesses, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Jews and - after the outbreak of word war II - Poles were persecuted. In the "Cristal Night", Nov. 9, 1938, more than 30.000 Jews were arrested. The number of camp inmates increased to more than 60.000 people.
Armament production and mass murder (1942-1945): The prisoners were mostly assigned to armament plants, thus many subcamps were built.
The SS executed Hitlers order to eliminate the Jews, called "Endlösung der Judenfrage" ("Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). The large extermination camps were built for the organised mass murder. In January 1945, 714.000 people were arrested in concentration camps, among them 511.000 men, the rest women and children.

The organisation of a KZ included the following domains:

I. Command Headquarters	IV. Administration
II. Political Department	V. Camp physician
III. Camp for "Protective Custody"

In order to make distinctions between life and work conditions, Heinrich Himmler decreed in early 1941 a classification of the concentration camps into various camp grades:

Grade I:	"All less incriminated and unconditionally re-educable protective custody prisoners" (Dachau, Auschwitz I)
Grade II:	"Heavily incriminated, but still re-educable prisoners" (Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, Auschwitz-Birkenau)
Grade III:	"Heavily incriminated incorrigibles and criminals with previous convictions as well as asocial persons, i.e. to all intents and purposes non re-educable prisoners" (Mauthausen)

Besides, special camps for mass extermination of jews and gypsies came into being (Belzec, Sobobor, Treblinka)