Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps (Todeslager), or killing centers (Tötungszentren), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily killed by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps also used extermination through labour in order to kill their prisoners.
The Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust—also known as the Porajmos, the Pharrajimos, and the Samudaripen —was the effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against Europe's Romani people during the Holocaust era.
Theodor Eicke was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was one of the key figures in the development of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Oswald Ludwig Pohl was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. As the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office and the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps, he was a key figure in the Final Solution, the genocide of the European Jews.
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.
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".
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.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. 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 France, 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.
Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, consisted of the murder of millions of ethnic Poles and the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. The Nazis justified these genocides on the basis of their racial theories, which regarded Poles and other Slavs, as well as Jews, as racially inferior Untermenschen.
Lieberose is a town in the Dahme-Spreewald district, in Brandenburg, Germany. It is situated 25 km north of Cottbus.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia is a term which is primarily used in reference to the genocide of Jews, but sometimes, it is also used in reference to the genocide of Serbs and Romani (Porajmos), within the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state which existed during World War II, was led by the Ustaše regime, and ruled an occupied area of Yugoslavia which included most of the territory of modern-day Croatia, the whole of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and the eastern part of Syrmia (Serbia). Of the 39,000 Jews who lived in the NDH in 1941, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that more than 30,000 were killed. Of these, 6,200 were shipped to Nazi Germany and the rest of them were killed in the NDH, the vast majority were killed in Ustaše-run concentration camps, such as Jasenovac. The Ustaše were the only quisling forces in Europe who operated their own extermination camps for the purpose of killing Jews and members of other ethnic groups.
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 for bargaining with the Allies.
The Šiauliai or Shavli Ghetto was a Jewish ghetto established in July 1941 by Nazi Germany in the city of Šiauliai in Nazi-occupied Lithuania during the Holocaust. The ghetto comprised two areas – one in the Kaukazas suburb and one on Trakai Street. Both were liquidated by July 1944, and their inhabitants were killed or transferred to Nazi concentration camps. In 1939, one quarter of the population of Šiauliai was Jewish, about 8,000 persons. By the end of World War II, only about 500 Jews of the city had survived.
The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II (1939–1945) began with the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, and it was formally concluded with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in May 1945. Throughout the entire course of the occupation, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR) both of which intended to eradicate Poland's culture and subjugate its people. In the summer-autumn of 1941, the lands which were annexed by the Soviets were overrun by Germany in the course of the initially successful German attack on the USSR. After a few years of fighting, the Red Army drove the German forces out of the USSR and crossed into Poland from the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Holocaust Museum of Greece, officially the Holocaust Memorial Museum & Educational Center of Greece on Human Rights, is an under-construction museum on The Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Greece. Its construction was proposed in 2016 and is partly funded by the Federal Republic of Germany, with support from the Municipality of Thessaloniki and mayor Yiannis Boutaris. The total construction cost is estimated at €25 million. The foundation stone was placed on 30 January 2018.
Gusen was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp operated by the SS between the villages of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and Langestein in the Reichsgau Ostmark. Primarily populated by Polish prisoners, there were also large numbers of Spanish Republicans, Soviet citizens, and Italians. Initially, prisoners worked in nearby quarries, producing granite which was sold by the SS company DEST.
Forced labor was an important and ubiquitous aspect of the Nazi concentration camps which operated in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. It was the harshest and most inhumane part of a larger system of forced labor in Nazi Germany.
