Karl-Otto Koch was a mid-ranking commander in the Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany who was the first commandant of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. From September 1941 until August 1942, he served as the first commandant of the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland, stealing vast amounts of valuables and money from murdered Jews. His wife, Ilse Koch, also participated in the crimes at Buchenwald.
Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a de facto basis in 1940. It operated from 21 May 1941 to September 1944, and was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France. The camp was located in a heavily forested and isolated area at an elevation of 800 metres (2,600 ft).
Flossenbürg was a Nazi concentration camp built in May 1938 by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Unlike other concentration camps, it was located in a remote area, in the Fichtel Mountains of Bavaria, adjacent to the town of Flossenbürg and near the German border with Czechoslovakia. The camp's initial purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners for the production of granite for Nazi architecture. In 1943, the bulk of prisoners switched to producing Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes and other armaments for Germany's war effort. Although originally intended for "criminal" and "asocial" prisoners, after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the camp's numbers swelled with political prisoners from outside Germany. It also developed an extensive subcamp system that eventually outgrew the main camp.
Dachau was one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany and the longest-running one, opening on 22 March 1933. The camp was initially intended to intern Hitler's political opponents, which consisted of communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. After its opening by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps or Arbeitskommandos, and were located throughout southern Germany and Austria. The main camp was liberated by U.S. forces on 29 April 1945.
Mauthausen was a German Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St. Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.
Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia. The actual barracks were built the following year by prisoners. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. In 1962, the former concentration camp with its remaining structures was turned into a memorial museum.
Ohrdruf was a German forced labor and concentration camp located near Ohrdruf, south of Gotha, in Thuringia, Germany. It was part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network.
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in Nazi concentration camps. Of the 50,000 guards who served in the concentration camps, training records indicate that approximately 3,500 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of Aufseherin translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen, Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts.
Gross-Rosen was a network of Nazi concentration camps built and operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. The main camp was located in the German village of Gross-Rosen, now the modern-day Rogoźnica in Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland, directly on the rail-line between the towns of Jawor (Jauer) and Strzegom (Striegau). Its prisoners were mostly Jews, Poles and Soviet citizens.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German SS troops were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. It is unclear how many SS guards were killed in the incident, but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50. In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp had forced 7,000 inmates on a death march that resulted in the death of many from exposure and shooting. When Allied soldiers liberated Dachau, they were variously shocked, horrified, disturbed, and angered at finding the massed corpses of prisoners, and by the combativeness of some of the remaining guards who allegedly fired on them.
Josef Kramer was a Hauptsturmführer in the SS and the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen Belsen concentration camps. Dubbed The Beast of Belsen by camp inmates, he was a German Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. He was detained by the British Army after the Second World War, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on the gallows in the prison at Hamelin by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
Ebensee was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp established by the SS to build tunnels for armaments storage near the town of Ebensee, Austria, in 1943. The camp held a total of 27,278 male inmates from 1943 until 1945. Between 8,500 and 11,000 prisoners died in the camp, most from hunger or malnutrition. Political prisoners were most common, and prisoners came from many different countries. Conditions were poor, and along with the lack of food, exposure to cold weather and forced hard labor made survival difficult. American troops of the 80th Infantry Division liberated the camp on 6 May 1945.
Rupprecht Gerngroß was a German lawyer and leader of the Freiheitsaktion Bayern or FAB, a group involved in an attempt to overthrow the Nazis in Munich in April 1945.
During the Holocaust, death marches were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces. Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners to bargain with the Allies.
Agfa-Commando is the widely used name for the München-Giesing - Agfa Kamerawerke satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp. By October 1944, the camp housed about five hundred women. They were used as slave laborers in the Agfa camera factory in München-Giesing, a suburb on the S.W. side of Munich 14 miles (23 km) from the main camp of Dachau. The women assembled ignition timing devices for bombs, artillery ammunition and V-1 and V-2 rockets; they used every opportunity to sabotage the production. In January 1945, citing the lack of food, the prisoners conducted a strike, an unheard-of action in a concentration camp. Production ended on 23 April 1945 and the women marched toward Wolfratshausen, where their commander eventually surrendered to advancing American troops.
The German term Prominente was used in World War II to describe high-profile prisoners from various countries that were imprisoned in, for example, the POW camp for officers Colditz or the Nazi concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Dachau for possible use as hostages. These prisoners had among them former statesmen, politicians, political dissidents and priests as well as prisoners of war related, or believed to be related, to allied politicians and royalties. The Colditz POW's were liberated on 14 April 1945 by the U.S. Army, whereas the prisoners from Sachsenhausen and Dachau where liberated from their SS-guards in turn by troops from the Wehrmacht and shortly thereafter by units from the 42nd Infantry Division and the 45th Infantry Division after the Transport of concentration camp inmates to Tyrol.
Hebertshausen shooting range was a shooting range at Dachau concentration camp, located two kilometres north of the Dachau main camp for SS guards that used Soviet live prisoners of war as targets. It was built in 1937-38 as an expansion to Dachau concentration camp. Between 1941 and 1942, more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners were murdered on the site. These were mainly officers, communist officials, and Jews. The victims were “singled out” according to ideological and racist criteria by Gestapo Einsatzkommandos in the POW camps of the military districts of Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden and Salzburg. After World War II, American troops assumed control of the site and continued to use it as a firing range. It is now a memorial to Nazi victims.
Dachau is a 72-page investigation report by the 7th US Army on Dachau, one of the concentration camps established by Nazi Germany. The report details the mass murder and mass atrocities committed at Dachau by the SS and other personnel. Following the liberation of the camp by the 7th US Army on 29 April 1945, the report was prepared during the following one or two weeks and published in May. In addition to a preface, the report contains three independent reports which partly overlap thematically. Although it contains some errors, the report is considered one of the first studies on the Nazi concentration camps.
Freiheitsaktion Bayern was an attempt in 1945 to overthrow the Nazi regime in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. While the revolt was a failure from a military point of view, it did prevent the further destruction of Munich and sped up the collapse of the Nazi regime in the city.
Schutzstaffel 
Germany 
Jewish rebels
Bavarian rebels