Turning Points · 1942

The camps were not all the same kind of place.

A concentration camp and a killing center were different institutions with different purposes, and the word most people use covers both. Here is what each one was, who was in it, and what happened to them.

Project Witness records and preserves Holocaust survivor testimony. This page is free to use, in classrooms and out of them.

Written for readers 14 and up. Some pages describe killing methods and public humiliation.

The concentration camps: the short answers

How many camps: USHMM documents more than 44,000 camps, ghettos and other sites of incarceration. The volume of its encyclopedia that covers the SS concentration camps describes 23 main camps and 898 subcamps.
The first camp: Dachau, March 22, 1933. Seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor.
What they were for: Holding people the regime called enemies, with no charge, no trial and no release date. Work, punishment, terror.
Why they existed at all: Antisemitism was at the foundation of the Holocaust, in USHMM's words, and a basic tenet of Nazi ideology. The first prisoners in 1933 were the regime's German political opponents. Beginning in 1941 Nazi leaders decided to murder the Jews of Europe, and that decision changed what the camps were used for.
Concentration camp vs killing center: A concentration camp registered you and worked you. A killing center murdered you within hours and never wrote your name down.
Who was held: German Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists first. Then Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti, gay men, clergy, people the regime classified as asocial, Soviet prisoners of war, and Jews: a few at first, then about 26,000 after Kristallnacht in November 1938.
The deadliest: Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp and a killing center at once, with approximately one million Jewish victims. After it, Treblinka II, with an estimated 925,000.
Liberation: Majdanek in July 1944. Bergen-Belsen April 15, 1945, Dachau April 29, Theresienstadt May 9.
Where the camps sit in the Holocaust: Six million Jews were murdered. USHMM states that figure in its own voice, independent research lands between five and six million, and Yad Vashem writes that there is no precise figure. Approximately 2.7 million of the six million were murdered at the five killing centers.
How many died in the camps: An estimate USHMM cites puts deaths of registered concentration camp prisoners at 795,889 to 955,215, not counting registered Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Adding the Jews, registered and unregistered, murdered at Auschwitz, approximately one million, and at Majdanek, at least 89,000, gives 1,885,889 to 2,045,215. The Majdanek component is disputed. Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II are in neither figure: they stood outside the concentration camp system, and almost nobody sent there was ever registered.

Each of these has a fuller answer below.

What were the concentration camps?

A prison outside the law, opened in 1933 for Germans, six years before the war and eight years before the first killing center.

A Nazi concentration camp was a prison camp where people were held with no charge, no trial and no release date. The SS called the instrument Schutzhaft, protective custody, which meant arrest with no judge and no end. You were sent for what you were or what you believed, then registered, numbered, marked with a colored triangle and put to work. Death was common. For most prisoners, death was not the reason they had been brought there.

A courtroom exhibit board headed CONCENTRATION CAMPS. A base map of central Europe is overprinted with dots, scattered through Germany and Austria and clustered thickly in occupied Poland. Pasted label strips around all four edges run leader lines down to individual sites, among them Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka. — The prosecution's own map of the network, put in evidence at United States v. Oswald Pohl, the 1947 Nuremberg trial of the SS office that ran the camps. One heading files Treblinka and Majdanek and Auschwitz alongside Dachau, and that flattening is what the rest of this page takes apart. Map of concentration camp locations, prosecution exhibit at the Pohl Trial, Nuremberg, 1947. National Archives and Records Administration, 169155812.

Trial exhibit OMGUS Military Tribunal · April 8, 1947 · US National Archives and Records Administration, NARA catalog id 169155812 Public domain View the record: The prosecution's own map of the network, put in evidence at United

The ideology came before the camp. Antisemitism was at the foundation of the Holocaust, USHMM writes, and a basic tenet of Nazi ideology: the regime blamed Jews for Germany's social, economic, political and cultural problems and taught that Jews were a separate and inferior race. In 1933 that belief acquired a police force and a prison camp. The people it put in the camp first were Germans, Communists and Social Democrats and trade unionists, and for five more years the campaign against Jews ran through law and boycott and the street rather than through the wire. Then, on November 10 and 11, 1938, in the days after Kristallnacht, almost 11,000 Jewish men were interned at Dachau. Most were released within weeks or months, many after proving they had arranged to leave the country. The object then was still to drive Jews out of Germany.

Then the object became killing them. Beginning in 1941, in USHMM's wording, Nazi leaders decided to implement the mass murder of Europe's Jews, and the German government's own name for it was the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. USHMM calls the decision to deport and systematically murder the European Jews one of the most significant events to alter the makeup of the concentration camp system. Five killing centers were built to carry it out, four of them outside the concentration camp system altogether. Inside the concentration camps the effect was a sorting: the ability to work offered a Jew the chance of survival, and the ones the SS judged unable to work were the first to be shot or deported.

Six million Jews were murdered. USHMM states the number in its own voice. No single German document accounts for every death; the figure is built from hundreds of thousands of pages of German records read against prewar and postwar population data, and independent research lands between five and six million, because the estimates rest on census comparisons and wartime documents, not on a single list of names. Of the six million, approximately 2.7 million were murdered at the five killing centers. About 2 million were murdered in mass shootings and related massacres. Between 800,000 and 1,000,000 were murdered in ghettos, labor camps and concentration camps.

War was used as grounds to ban releases in September 1939, which handed the SS a captive labor force. In March 1942 Himmler folded the camp Inspectorate into the SS Economic-Administration Main Office under Oswald Pohl, and the SS began renting prisoners to war industries for a fee.

The biggest number attached to the word is the one most often misused. USHMM's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos project covers more than 44,000 camps, ghettos and other sites of incarceration: about 6,000 written up in narrative entries, prisoner-of-war camps and military brothels among them, and an estimated 38,000 forced-labor camps for a database still to come with Volume VII. Volume I, the volume that covers the SS concentration camps, describes 23 main camps and 898 subcamps. A headline reporting 44,000 concentration camps is off by a factor of roughly fifty.

A concentration camp and a death camp are not the same thing

Six kinds of site, six questions you can ask yourself. The answers are not interchangeable.

Most people call every Nazi site a concentration camp. It is the commonest error in the subject and it is not a quarrel about vocabulary. The phrase makes a reader picture barracks, roll call and a prisoner population in the tens of thousands. At Treblinka almost everyone was dead within hours of the train stopping.

Concentration camp

In GermanKonzentrationslager, KL or KZ

The question that separates itWere people registered and kept alive to be used?

Arrivals went on the roll, took a number and were worked. Dachau had a gas chamber that was never used for mass killing. At least 41,500 people died there anyway.

Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück
Forced-labor camp

In GermanVernichtung durch Arbeit, the policy USHMM renders as annihilation through work

The question that separates itWas the site built around a job?

A quarry, a plant, a rail line. Move the work and the camp has no reason to exist. The SS also used work itself as a way of killing: certain prisoners were put to labor in conditions built to produce illness, injury and death.

Treblinka I, Trawniki, Budzyń, the Dachau subcamps
Killing center

In GermanVernichtungslager, death camp

The question that separates itWas there a camp population?

If the answer is a work detail of several hundred to a thousand prisoners and nobody else, because everyone else was killed on arrival, it is a killing center. USHMM counts five, Yad Vashem six.

Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II, Auschwitz-Birkenau
Transit camp

In GermanDurchgangslager

The question that separates itWhere did people die?

If the mass death attached to a site happened at the end of a train line elsewhere, it is a transit camp. Westerbork had a school, and from 1943 a train left every Tuesday.

Westerbork, Drancy, Mechelen, Fossoli di Carpi
Ghetto

In GermanJüdischer Wohnbezirk for the open kind

The question that separates itWas it a place that already existed?

A district of a real town, with streets and a prewar name, walled or fenced or declared off limits. A camp is purpose-built barracks. Theresienstadt sits on the line.

Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Vilna
Prisoner-of-war camp

In Germanrun by the army, not the SS

The question that separates itWho ran it, and who was in it?

A formal distinction that says nothing about how deadly the camp was. About 3.6 percent of British and American prisoners died in German hands. About 57 percent of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners did.

Stalag IX B, Bergen-Belsen 1940 to 1945

Treblinka shows why the labels carry weight. There were two Treblinkas a mile apart with the same name. Treblinka I was a forced-labor camp. Treblinka II was a killing center, and in fourteen months its staff murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews there, along with Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war in unknown numbers. A handful from each transport were kept alive to run the killing. Isadore Helfing lived because the prisoner who drove the camp's horse cart was shot and he was picked to replace him.

In account of that thing, I survived in Treblinka. I, from then on I had nothing to do with the people, with the, working by the dead people. I just used the horse. I learned how to clean horses, and feed them, and bring water.
Isadore Helfing, one of the small number of Jewish prisoners kept alive at Treblinka as labor. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection.

An outdoor panel showing two camp plans side by side, each with buildings, fences and a rail spur. — The on-site plan of both Treblinka camps, the labor camp and the killing center a mile apart. Tajchman Maria / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Labels in Polish.

Postwar memorial photograph Tajchman Maria · August 29, 2009 · Wikimedia Commons (photograph of an on-site interpretive plan) CC BY-SA 4.0: licence for The on-site plan of both Treblinka camps, the labor camp and the View the record: The on-site plan of both Treblinka camps, the labor camp and the

Auschwitz: what it was and what happened there

Try it: what kind of place was this?

Seven camps. Decide what kind of place each one was, then check your answer against its record.

Bergen-Belsen

Show the answer

A concentration camp.

The question that separates itWere people registered and kept alive to be used?

It was not a killing center. It became a place of mass death in its last four months, when the SS emptied camps in the east and dumped tens of thousands of starving people here with no food, no water and no sanitation, and typhus did the rest.
Open the record for Bergen-Belsen
Treblinka II

Show the answer

A killing center.

The question that separates itWas there a camp population?

Most people who arrived were dead within two hours. There was no registration, no tattoo, no prisoner number.
Open the record for Treblinka II
Westerbork

Show the answer

A transit camp.

The question that separates itWhere did people die?

Westerbork was an orderly place with a hospital, a school, a cabaret and a football pitch, run day to day by a Jewish administration under German command, and every Tuesday a train left it for the east. That is the whole horror of a transit camp: the conditions inside were bearable precisely because nobody was meant to stay.
Open the record for Westerbork
Auschwitz

Show the answer

A concentration camp and killing center.

Established as a concentration camp in spring 1940, Auschwitz became a killing center as well when mass gassing began at Birkenau in 1942. The two functions ran side by side on the same complex until the end.
Open the record for Auschwitz
Treblinka I

Show the answer

A forced-labor camp.

The question that separates itWas the site built around a job?

Treblinka I was a gravel-pit labor camp about a mile and a half from the killing center. Polish and Jewish prisoners worked the quarry and a nearby irrigation project. People were imprisoned here, held for months, and died of exhaustion, beatings and shooting.
Open the record for Treblinka I
Dachau

Show the answer

A concentration camp.

The question that separates itWere people registered and kept alive to be used?

It was a prison outside the law: no charge, no trial, no release date. It was never a killing center.
Open the record for Dachau
Theresienstadt

Show the answer

A transit ghetto.

The question that separates itWhere did people die?

Tens of thousands died there of hunger, overcrowding and disease. Most of the rest were put on trains to Auschwitz and the other killing centers.
Open the record for Theresienstadt

All 61 camps are sorted this way in the directory further down this page, each with its full record.

The camp that was built to be photographed

At Theresienstadt most of the surviving photographs and film were made in order to deceive. Publishing them without saying so delivers the SS message intact.

Theresienstadt was an eighteenth-century garrison town in Bohemia. The SS emptied it of its Czech inhabitants and began filling it with Jews on November 24, 1941. USHMM calls it at once a transit ghetto for Czech Jews and an old-age ghetto for elderly German and Austrian Jews, decorated veterans of the First World War, and well-known figures such as artists and community leaders. In May 1943 the SS renamed it a Jewish settlement.

Then they rebuilt it. The campaign had a name, Verschönerung, beautification. USHMM dates the order to February and March 1944, the Terezín Initiative Institute to the end of 1943. Crews put up a music pavilion, a playground, a theater, shops and a café, and barbed wire came down along the visitors' route. A month before the visit one building was fitted out as a school. No lesson was ever taught in it. About 7,500 people were deported to Auschwitz between May 15 and May 18, 1944 to thin the look of overcrowding. Most were murdered on July 10 and 11.

The delegation came on June 23, 1944 and stayed from 11 in the morning until 7 at night. Maurice Rossel of the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted it, with three months of practical experience, alongside two Danes. German officers escorted them throughout, and Rossel was not allowed to speak privately with anyone except the Jewish elder, Paul Eppstein, who welcomed the delegation with figures the SS had falsified. They watched the finale of the children's opera Brundibár and a soccer game with a cheering crowd. All three reported favorably and repeated the lie that Jews were not deported from Theresienstadt. Eight hours bought that. Rossel's report called Theresienstadt a final camp from which nobody was normally sent on, and the ICRC's archives record that its 1946 report left the visit out.

In August and September 1944 the SS filmed the place. The title on the film is Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, a documentary film from the Jewish settlement area, which carries the SS fiction in the title; it is widely known by another name, Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, which was not the title on the film. Kurt Gerron, a Jewish German director imprisoned there, was made to direct it under SS supervision, and the cast and musicians were prisoners. Gerron went to Auschwitz on the last train out, October 28, 1944, and was killed on arrival. The film survives only in fragments, and many of the people visible in them were murdered within weeks of being filmed smiling.

Ink drawing of two shop buildings signed LEBENSMITTEL and PARFUMERIE, held up from behind by long timber props like stage scenery, with human figures heaped on the ground beside them. — Bedrich Fritta, Facades for the International Commission. Fritta ran the ghetto's drawing office, which produced graphic work to SS order, and secretly used its materials to draw what was actually there. Ink, pen and brush. Jewish Museum Berlin, permanent loan from the Fritta-Haas family. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Made clandestinely by a prisoner Bedrich Fritta (Fritz Taussig), 1906 to November 1944 · 1943 or 1944, Jewish Museum Berlin prints 1943/44 and adds that it may be as early as autumn 1942 · Wikimedia Commons Public domain View the record: Bedrich Fritta, Facades for the International Commission. Fritta ran

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Ella Stein-Weisberger, born 1930 in Lom u Mostu, was a child in Theresienstadt and sang in the children's opera Brundibár. She describes the plywood plaque she burned the Theresienstadt emblem into by hand, inscribed on the back to her mother. Free to watch. Project Witness.

Ink drawing of a dark, crowded room lit by one candle, twenty or more gaunt people of all ages pressed together sitting and lying on bedding and on bundles marked with transport numbers. — Bedrich Fritta, In the Living Quarters. The SS found drawings like this one in the summer of 1944 and called them atrocity propaganda. Fritta and his family were sent to the Gestapo prison in the Small Fortress on July 17. He was deported to Auschwitz in October and died there in November. Ghetto Fighters House, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Made clandestinely by a prisoner Bedrich Fritta (Fritz Taussig), 1906 to November 1944 · between 1941 and 1944 · Wikimedia Commons Public domain View the record: Bedrich Fritta, In the Living Quarters. The SS found drawings like

The beautification saved nobody who performed in it. USHMM records more than 18,000 people deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on 11 transports between September 28 and October 28, 1944, after the filming, and many of the people visible in the film were on them. About 140,000 Jews were sent to Theresienstadt in all. Deaths inside the ghetto are put at about 34,000 by USHMM and over 35,000 by the Terezín Memorial. USHMM counts about 88,000 deported onward and 3,500 survivors of those transports. The Memorial counts more than 87,000 sent east on 63 trains and 3,800 who lived to see liberation. Nothing here is averaged. Soviet troops entered on May 9, 1945 and found around 30,000 alive.

Watercolor of a long two-story building seen down its length, pale walls with dark shuttered windows and a brown roof with dormer windows, a dirt street running beside it where a few small figures walk and a wooden handcart stands empty. — Petr Ginz, Street in Theresienstadt. Ginz was deported from Prague to Theresienstadt in 1942, at fourteen, and edited Vedem, the clandestine magazine he and other boys in the youth barracks wrote and passed around. He drew this street from inside the ghetto and dated it in the lower left, 22.IX.44. The SS had finished filming the town on September 11, eleven days before the date on this sheet. Six days later, on September 28, 1944, Ginz was deported to Auschwitz and murdered on arrival. He was sixteen. Watercolor, ink and pencil on paper. Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

Made clandestinely by a prisoner Petr Ginz (1928-1944) · Inscribed 22.IX.44 in the lower left, read as September 22, 1944. Yad Vashem publishes no date for this sheet. · Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem Yad Vashem View the record: Petr Ginz, Street in Theresienstadt. Ginz was deported from Prague to

...one day when we were doing the drawings with her, she said, children, you are not number. You have a name.
Ella Stein-Weisberger, who was a child in Theresienstadt, remembering her art teacher. Project Witness testimony. Watch the full testimony. This passage begins at 43:54: Ella Stein-Weisberger, Project Witness

Dachau

Dachau opened on March 22, 1933, seven weeks after Hitler took power, on the grounds of a disused munitions factory ten miles northwest of Munich. Himmler announced it as the first concentration camp for political prisoners, and that is who arrived: German Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists.

That October the commandant, Theodor Eicke, issued brutal punishment rules and standing orders for the camp SS. Made Inspector of Concentration Camps, he imposed the Dachau code on the whole system, and Dachau became the training school for SS guards. It matters not because it was first but because it was copied.

A long line of uniformed SS men at attention in ranks on open ground, photographed from one end so the row recedes into the distance, low camp buildings behind them. — SS guard detachment on parade, Dachau, May 27, 1933. Photograph by Friedrich Franz Bauer. Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-01-16 / Friedrich Franz Bauer / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

Photographed at the time Friedrich Franz Bauer · May 27, 1933 · Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-01-16 CC BY-SA 3.0 de: licence for SS guard detachment on parade, Dachau, May 27, 1933. Photograph by View the record: SS guard detachment on parade, Dachau, May 27, 1933. Photograph by

Its population tracked the regime's growing list of enemies: Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma, gay men, people it classified as asocial, clergy, Soviet prisoners of war. After Kristallnacht almost eleven thousand Jewish men were interned here. Most were released within weeks or months, many after proving they had arranged to leave Germany. Jews came back in numbers only at the end, on transports out of the east.

Dachau ran roughly 140 subcamps, most of them in southern Bavaria at armaments plants. Kaufering and Muehldorf, the largest complexes, were built to dig bombproof bunkers for fighter-plane factories. David Lenga was seventeen when he was sent from Auschwitz to Dachau on August 31, 1944, where he was “registered, de-loused and assigned the barrack and the wooden bin where I had to live and sleep.” From there he was transferred to Kaufering. From 1942 physicians ran high-altitude, hypothermia, seawater, and drug experiments here, and hundreds died or were harmed.

And I knew I'm gonna be killed. I knew it. So my right hand and my left hand all of a sudden started moving in perfect harmony. And the Strauss Blue Danube was heard coming out of my violin. ... Instead, the SS guard was humming the melody ... And he, he just smiled and, “Let him live.”
Sandor (Shony) Alex Braun, oral history, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sandor (Shony) Alex Braun

Dachau had a gas chamber and it was never used for mass killing. It stood in the 1942 crematorium building known as Barrack X, and USHMM's finding is flat: no credible evidence it was used to murder human beings. Selection did the work instead. Prisoners too sick to work went to the Hartheim killing center near Linz, where more than 2,500 Dachau prisoners were gassed. Others were shot on the camp's ranges, at least 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war among them. At least 41,500 died at Dachau by the memorial's count and at least 40,000 by USHMM's. Both are floors: men brought here to be executed were never registered.

Typhus broke out in December 1944, and more than fifteen thousand prisoners died of disease, starvation and SS violence before liberation, more than a third of everyone Dachau killed in twelve years. On April 26, 1945 the registers listed 67,665 prisoners across the camp and its subcamps. That day the SS marched more than seven thousand south toward Tegernsee, and at least 25,000 were walked or shipped out in all. Anyone who could not keep going was shot.

American units reached the camp on April 29, 1945 and freed roughly 32,000 people. Part of the gap between 67,665 and 32,000 is the marches; the rest is the subcamps, which the 67,665 included. On the approach the troops found more than thirty railroad cars of bodies.

Saturday we arrived to Dachau, and Sunday morning we were liberated by the Americans. ...somebody came in, a Jewish soldier comes in.
Yitzchok Weiss, who reached Dachau the day before it was liberated. Project Witness testimony. Watch the full testimony. This passage begins at 25:27: Yitzchok Weiss, Project Witness

A crowd of thin men in prison stripes and mixed clothing pressed together indoors, arms raised, several holding bottles up toward the camera. — Polish prisoners celebrate their liberation, Dachau, April or May 1945. Photograph by T/4 Arland Musser, US Army Signal Corps. National Archives and Records Administration, 111-SC-207743.

Photographed by liberating forces T/4 Arland Musser, US Army Signal Corps · April 29 to May 1945 · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, photograph #83818, USHMM #83818; NARA 111-SC-207743 Public domain View the record: Polish prisoners celebrate their liberation, Dachau, April or May

Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen was not a killing center. It killed by hunger, thirst, cold, filth, and epidemic disease, and by an SS administration that watched and did nothing. Bella Jakubowicz Tovey, deported to Bergen-Belsen in 1944 from a subcamp of Gross-Rosen, put the difference plainly: “Bergen-Belsen was, was not a, was not like Auschwitz. There were no gas chambers. They didn't need any gas chambers, it was a really death camp.”

It began as a Wehrmacht camp, built in 1940 eleven miles north of Celle, and until 1943 it held only prisoners of war. Some fourteen thousand Soviet prisoners died there by the spring of 1942, and more than 19,500 lay in the camp cemetery by January 1945. Almost no popular account of Belsen mentions them.

In April 1943 the SS took the southern section from the army and made it an Aufenthaltslager, holding Jews it meant to trade for Germans interned abroad, or for currency and goods. Conditions there were at first unlike any other camp: prisoners kept their luggage, wore civilian clothes, ran a religious life in secret, and twenty-seven diaries survive from it. At least 14,600 Jewish prisoners were sent there. About 2,560 were ever released.

A black and white aerial photograph of a rectangular camp: parallel rows of long huts, straight service roads, open squares between the blocks, heath and forest around the perimeter. — The best-known photographs of Belsen date from April 1945 and after. This one shows the camp seven months earlier, still running. Bergen-Belsen from the air, 541 Squadron, RAF, September 17, 1944. National Collection of Aerial Photography, NCAP-000-000-003-440.

Aerial reconnaissance RAF, 541 Squadron · September 17, 1944 · Wikimedia Commons, NCAP-000-000-003-440; sortie 106G/2946, frame 3051; 541 Squadron RAF Public domain View the record: The best-known photographs of Belsen date from April 1945 and after.

Then it became a dumping ground. From December 1944 at least 85,000 men, women and children arrived on transports and death marches from camps closer to the front. There was no water for them, almost no sanitation, no shelter. Typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery went through the barracks, and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial's account of the SS response is one clause: they never seriously tried to contain them. More than eighteen thousand people died in March 1945 alone.

Bergen-Belsen was hell on earth. Nothing ever in literature could compare to anything what Bergen-Belsen was. When we arrived, the dead were not carried away any more, you stepped over them, you fell over them if you couldn't walk.
Alice Lok Cahana, oral history, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Alice Lok Cahana

Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus here. The Dutch state fixed their date of death at March 31, 1945, a legal presumption entered in 1954. Research published by the Anne Frank House in 2015 concluded both were dead by the end of February. USHMM writes February or March, the memorial writes March, and no source supports a particular day.

A flat pale stone slab on heather-covered ground, carved with the sisters' names and dates, small stones and flowers left on its surface. — The stone marks their memory and not their grave. Nobody knows where either sister lies. Memorial stone for Anne and Margot Frank, Bergen-Belsen. Photograph by Sipalius, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Postwar memorial photograph Sipalius · October 8, 2021 · Wikimedia Commons (own work) CC BY-SA 4.0: licence for The stone marks their memory and not their grave. Nobody knows where View the record: The stone marks their memory and not their grave. Nobody knows where

The camp was handed over on April 15, 1945 without a shot, after days of ceasefire talks, and the SS destroyed the administrative files first. British troops found thousands past saving and about thirteen thousand dead lying unburied. The unit war diary at the National Archives, WO 171/4773, records the first sight of them: “little more than living skeletons, with haggard yellowish faces.”

It was about 5pm on 15 April 1945 when the miracle actually happened: the first British tank rolled into the camp. ... We did not greet our liberators with shouts of joy. We were silent.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, from Survival: Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Story (Quill/Aegis, 2003). © Aegis Institute. As published by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

A British tribunal sat at Lueneburg in the autumn of 1945. It convicted 30 of the 48 charged, and commandant Josef Kramer, chief woman guard Elisabeth Volkenrath and Irma Grese were among the eleven hanged at Hamelin that December. Many had served at Auschwitz first, and the tribunal charged them with that too. After that, almost nothing. At least 480 people worked as guards or headquarters staff at Belsen, and more than two hundred are known by name and never stood trial. German courts held one trial about the camp, at Jena in 1949, and it ended in acquittal.

The memorial counts at least 52,000 dead out of 120,000 imprisoned, USHMM approximately 50,000, and since 1990 it has recovered about 11,500 names. The SS destroyed the registry, so the rest of the dead will stay nameless.

They came in, they looked at us... there were thousands and thousands of dead people. They didn't know what to do. ...You couldn't step. Every step was a body.
Toby Frankfurter, on the day British troops reached Bergen-Belsen. Project Witness testimony. Watch the full testimony. This passage begins at 37:33: Toby Frankfurter, Project Witness

What a day was

The day began and ended with counting. Roll call, the Appell, was held after waking and again when the work details came back, and prisoners stood in ranks in the open until the numbers came out right.

Every morning we were counted. Why we were counted I cannot tell you, but it had to be precise and if the numbers didn't come out, you had to be counted again. It if took one hour, if it took five hours, they didn't care. ... Whether it was cold, whether it was raining, whether it was sunshine...you had to be counted.
Ruth Moser Borsos, describing Bergen-Belsen. Oral history, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Ruth Moser Borsos

Buchenwald's roll call square covered twenty thousand square meters, watched by machine guns and lit by floodlights. The memorial there records that some roll calls ran as long as seventy-two hours and that people died standing on it.

Ranks of men in caps standing in close formation on an open square, the rows running away toward low barrack buildings. — Prisoners lined up for roll call, Dachau, July 20, 1938. Photograph by Friedrich Franz Bauer. The German Federal Archive's own caption calls the men “presumably Jews,” and that uncertainty is part of the record. Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-27-13A / Friedrich Franz Bauer / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

Photographed at the time Friedrich Franz Bauer · July 20, 1938 · Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-27-13A CC BY-SA 3.0 de: licence for Prisoners lined up for roll call, Dachau, July 20, 1938. Photograph View the record: Prisoners lined up for roll call, Dachau, July 20, 1938. Photograph

But we did have to stand a roll call like four or five hours each day when they counted us. But you never knew the next morning which children were still going to be there, because they died overnight.
Leah Scharf, who was ten years old in Bergen-Belsen. Project Witness testimony. Watch the full testimony. This passage begins at 10:28: Leah Scharf, Project Witness

Food was a watery vegetable soup and about half a piece of bread a day, which Yad Vashem notes was not enough for people doing hard labor. They slept in tiers. Blanka Rothschild, deported from the Lodz ghetto to Ravensbrueck, described it: “We slept two, three to a wooden, uh, bunk. The tiers in Ravensbrueck were packed with human beings.” She also said the thing no camp record holds: “the human spirit suffered more than the physical spirit.”

Watercolor of a barracks room with wooden bunks in tiers meeting at a corner, a ladder rising between them, folded red and blue striped bedding on one tier, dark coats hanging from the frames, and two pairs of shoes on the bare floor. — Petr Ginz, Interior of Living Quarters in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, dated 18.II.43 in the lower left. Ginz had turned fifteen earlier that month. He drew the tiered bunks he slept among, the ladder between them, the coats hung on the frames and the shoes left on the floor. Theresienstadt was a ghetto and transit camp, not a concentration camp of the kind described here. What it records is a prisoner's own view of how people were made to sleep. Watercolor, ink and pencil on paper. Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.

Made clandestinely by a prisoner Petr Ginz (1928-1944) · Inscribed 18.II.43 in the lower left, February 18, 1943. · Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem Yad Vashem View the record: Petr Ginz, Interior of Living Quarters in the Theresienstadt Ghetto,

Work was the purpose and the method. In the spring of 1942 Himmler reorganized the camps under the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, and from there the SS hired prisoners out at a profit, on signed contracts, to military and civilian agencies and to private firms making armaments, uniforms and building materials. Himmler was running the murder of the Jews of Europe in the same months. The two demands pulled against each other and the SS never chose between them. It ran them both through the same prisoners.

That is the policy the phrase names. USHMM renders it annihilation through work, Vernichtung durch Arbeit, and it was a program, not a description of hard conditions. Categories of prisoner were selected for it and put to work under conditions that would directly and deliberately lead to illness, injury and death. The labor was taken out of the person and the person died of the labor, and both halves were the point. In the autumn of 1942 thousands of people released from German prisons as security suspects were sent to the concentration camps and worked to death under that program. For Jews the same policy ran the other way round: while the Final Solution was being carried out, the ability to work offered a chance of survival, and the ones the SS judged unable to work were the first to be shot or deported. Some of the work fed the war economy. Much of it was pointless, done without tools, clothing, food or rest. At Mauthausen prisoners were driven up 186 steps out of a stone quarry carrying boulders.

Between the SS and the prisoners the SS placed prisoners. Kapos ran the work details, and camp elders, block elders and clerks ran the barracks. USHMM is direct about the reason: it saved German manpower and money, and it broke solidarity. The privileges were real: more food and better clothing. So was the price. Primo Levi called this a grey zone and put the responsibility on the state that built it. The Mauthausen Memorial quotes Hans Maršálek, a former prisoner: “For a long time I didn't notice that I had become a part of this death machinery.”

The marking system arrived later than people assume. The SS began sewing colored inverted triangles onto prisoners' clothing in 1937 and 1938, four and five years after the first camp opened, and applied it unevenly. What the colors record is how the SS sorted people. They describe nobody.

The triangle system

Marking	The category the SS assigned
Red triangle	Political prisoners.
Green triangle	People the SS classified as criminals.
Black or brown triangle	People the regime classified as asocial, a label it applied to Roma, nonconformists, and vagrants.
Pink triangle	Gay men and men accused of homosexuality.
Purple triangle	Jehovah's Witnesses.
Yellow star	Jewish prisoners, sewn onto the uniform.
Yellow triangle under a second triangle	A Jewish prisoner also placed in another category. A Jewish political prisoner wore yellow beneath red.
A letter on the badge	The first letter of the German name of the prisoner's country: P for Poles, T for Czechs.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Classification System in Nazi Concentration Camps.

A printed grid of colored inverted triangles in labeled columns with German headings, national letters on some triangles, paired triangles forming stars in one column. — The period chart, not a modern redraw. German-language chart of prisoner markings, 1940s. Wikimedia Commons; the file page tags it public domain as a German official work and also licenses it CC BY-SA 4.0.

Period document Photographer unknown · 1940s · via Wikimedia Commons Public domain View the record: The period chart, not a modern redraw. German-language chart of

A guard could read a prisoner's official identity from across the yard. That was the design.

The killing centers

Nazi Germany built five killing centers to murder Jews with poison gas: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only the last was also a concentration camp, which is why Auschwitz still held about 67,000 registered prisoners when the SS began evacuating it in January 1945, and only three men are known to have survived Belzec.

There was a selection at these camps, just not for a labor force. Staff kept a few people from each transport to empty the gas chambers and sort the clothing of the dead, murdered them, and took replacements from the next train.

A single-track rail siding running through flat open ground toward a treeline, photographed at ground level in 1945. No buildings stand along it. — A spur off a working railway, ending nowhere. The railway siding to Treblinka, 1945. From J. Gumkowski and A. Rutkowski, 'Treblinka' (Warsaw, 1962). Public domain.

Postwar memorial photograph Photographer unknown · 1945 · Wikimedia Commons Public domain View the record: A spur off a working railway, ending nowhere. The railway siding to

Chelmno came first. On December 8, 1941 the Germans killed about 700 Jewish men, women and children from Kolo in the cargo compartments of vans piped with engine exhaust. USHMM puts the dead at 156,300 or more, Yad Vashem at approximately 320,000. Seven Jewish men are known to have escaped.

How did I know my mother arrived at Chelmno? There were many handbags, a mountain of handbags. Once, I found a handbag with my mother's pictures and all her documents.
Szymon Srebrnik, Chełmno survivor, quoted in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Chelmno'. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Szymon Srebrnik

A burned-out box-bodied truck standing in a yard, its panels stripped back to the frame. — A van of the type the SS converted into a mobile gas chamber. It is not an identified Chelmno vehicle. Magirus-Deutz van found at Kolo, Poland, 1945. Archives of the Polish Ministry of Justice. Public domain.

Postwar photograph Photographer unknown · 1945 · Archives of the Polish Ministry of Justice Public domain View the record: A van of the type the SS converted into a mobile gas chamber. It is

Belzec opened in March 1942 and closed that December, killing approximately 434,500 people by USHMM's count with carbon monoxide from a large engine, the method then copied at Sobibor and Treblinka. Rudolf Reder gave the principal survivor account.

A tall dark stone wall cut with rows of Hebrew and Latin-script first names, lit from one side, filling the frame. — Jewish given names inscribed in the Ohel Niche, Belzec Museum and Memorial Site, photographed in 2020. Photo: Dreamcatcher25 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Postwar memorial photograph Dreamcatcher25 · July 7, 2020 · Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0: licence for Jewish given names inscribed in the Ohel Niche, Belzec Museum and View the record: Jewish given names inscribed in the Ohel Niche, Belzec Museum and

Sobibor opened in spring 1942 on a rail spur in the Lublin district and killed at least 167,000 people by USHMM's count, about 250,000 by Yad Vashem's older figure. Arrivals were walked down a fenced path the SS called the tube, into chambers labeled as showers. Treblinka II opened in July 1942, and in fourteen months its staff murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews.

But in five, ten minutes this place had to look spotless. And it looked spotless. Like there was never nobody on the place, so the next transport when it comes in, they shouldn't see what's going on.
Abraham Bomba, Treblinka. Oral history, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Abraham Bomba

A grainy black and white air photograph of open country crossed by field boundaries and a rail line, with no camp structures visible. — Reconnaissance photograph of the Treblinka area, taken after November 1943, by which time the SS had dismantled the killing center and tried to disguise the site. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Public domain.

Aerial reconnaissance Photographer unknown · After November 30, 1943 · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, USHMM photo archive pa29035; NARA Source Record ID: 373-Aerial Photographs--GX12225 Public domain View the record: Reconnaissance photograph of the Treblinka area, taken after November

A color aerial photograph of long low wooden barracks in ordered rows, ringed by fencing, with a chimney and a domed structure at one edge. — Majdanek from the air in 2018, still standing: barracks, fence lines, watchtowers, the crematorium. The Red Army arrived before the SS could level it. Photo: Fallaner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Postwar memorial photograph Fallaner · July 18, 2018 · Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0: licence for Majdanek from the air in 2018, still standing: barracks, fence lines, View the record: Majdanek from the air in 2018, still standing: barracks, fence lines,

Majdanek, and a number that changed

Majdanek is where the categories give out. It sat on the edge of Lublin, beside the suburb of Majdan Tatarski. It opened in October 1941 for Soviet prisoners of war, became a concentration camp people survived for years, and also built and used gas chambers. On November 3, 1943 the SS and police shot about 18,000 Jews there in one day, in an operation the Germans called Erntefest, harvest festival. USHMM counts five killing centers and treats Majdanek as a concentration camp that also gassed people. Yad Vashem counts six death camps and includes it.

Majdanek is also where the numbers moved. For decades the published toll was 360,000, an estimate made in 1948 by the judge Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz. A 1992 article by Czeslaw Rajca brought it to 235,000. In 2005 Tomasz Kranz, who headed research at the State Museum at Majdanek, published approximately 78,000, about 59,000 of them Jews. He got there by counting: surviving fragments of the camp death book, the death registry, the notices the Germans sent to parishes in Lublin, the testimony SS men gave at their Dusseldorf trial, and the accounts of prisoners who lived. USHMM has not adopted it and publishes 80,000 to 110,000 for the main camp. Zygmunt Mankowski of the museum board called the findings highly authoritative and said in the same breath that they should be accepted with a certain caution, because nobody knows how many prisoners passed through Majdanek or how many deaths went unregistered.

A figure that comes down is not a crime that shrinks. It came down because a Holocaust museum's own historians went back to the perpetrators' paperwork and their trial testimony and counted again. Revised counts have also lowered Belzec's toll, from 600,000 to about 434,500.

An empty concrete room with a heavy fitted door, a pipe entering high on one wall, and staining across the plaster. — An intact gas chamber at Majdanek, published by the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland in its Bulletin, Vol. IV (1948). Photographer and date unknown. Public domain.

Postwar photograph Photographer unknown · n.d. · Wikimedia Commons, Vol. IV, 1948 Public domain View the record: An intact gas chamber at Majdanek, published by the Main Commission

The Red Army reached Majdanek in July 1944 and found fewer than 500 prisoners and a camp still standing. That is why a photograph exists of the inside of a gas chamber. At Treblinka there is a field.

The revolts

By the summer of 1943 fewer transports were arriving at Sobibor. The prisoners who ran the camp had already learned that Belzec had been dismantled and its last workers killed. They were not guessing.

A committee under Leon Feldhendler, who had headed the Judenrat in Zolkiew, planned a mass escape and got nowhere, because none of them had ever been soldiers. In September a transport of Jewish Red Army prisoners arrived from Minsk, and Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky had a plan within three weeks.

A schematic plan showing a rail spur entering a fenced rectangle divided into three numbered sectors, with a narrow corridor running from the middle sector to a building at the far corner. — Three camps inside one fence: the workshops where the SS were killed, the sorting sheds, and the killing area at the end of the path the guards called the tube. Reconstruction of Sobibor as it stood in summer 1943, drawn in 2020, not to scale, and the mapmaker notes that further archaeology may change it. Botterweg14 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Map drawn after the events Botterweg14 · June 14, 2020 · Wikimedia Commons (user-created reconstruction) CC BY-SA 4.0: licence for Three camps inside one fence: the workshops where the SS were killed, View the record: Three camps inside one fence: the workshops where the SS were killed,

The plan was to kill the SS one at a time in the workshops in the hour before evening roll call, then take the gate and the towers when the roughly 600 prisoners lined up to be counted. It began on October 14, 1943. Deputy commandant Johann Niemann came to the tailor shop for a suit fitting and was killed with an axe. Ten more died the same way over the next hour.

Then it went wrong. Karl Frenzel, the officer they most needed to account for, could not be found. The organizers climbed onto a table in front of the assembled prisoners and said so, and that it was every man for himself.

And as I was on top, I noticed there are a lot of bodies already on the mines, some people went before me. I got a bullet shot from the tower right here, and I fell down. ... I started hopping on dead bodies, and soon I reached the woods, we were in the woods, and it was...I felt, I did it, I made it.
Esther Raab, Sobibor. Oral history, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Esther Raab

Chaim Engel, who killed a guard that afternoon and got out with Selma Wijnberg, later his wife, remembered the other half of it.

Some people didn't ran at all. They gave up. They didn't want to run. They just gave up. They, they just, waited 'til they get killed.
Chaim Engel. US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Chaim Engel

Of about 600 prisoners, roughly 300 got out through the wire and the minefield. At least 100 were hunted down within days. Of the perhaps 200 not caught immediately, about 50 were alive at the end of the war. Everyone still inside was shot by the end of the next day.

Sobibor is the one revolt that closed a camp. After October 14 the SS brought Jewish prisoners from Treblinka to tear the killing installations down, then murdered them. Yad Vashem puts it flatly: the revolt put an end to the camp.

Toivi Blatt was sixteen. He remembered one sentence of what Pechersky said from the table.

But the sentence I remember exactly what he said, was, 'If somebody of you will survive, you should remember to told...to tell the world the story of Sobibor.' And that what I did never forget, and that what I am doing.
Tomasz (Toivi) Blatt. US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Tomasz (Toivi) Blatt

Treblinka, August 2, 1943

Treblinka came first, and it did not close the camp. It was begun by Dr. Julian Chorazycki, a Warsaw physician and the first leader of its organizing committee, who took poison in April 1943 after the deputy commandant found him carrying money meant to buy weapons.

A square identity portrait of a middle-aged man in a jacket and tie, facing the camera, printed on a document form. — He died four months before the revolt he had begun to plan. The photograph comes from an occupation-authority questionnaire, which is why it exists at all. Dr. Julian Chorazycki, 1940. Central Medical Library of Warsaw (L. 1001, k. 7). Public domain.

Portrait or personal record Photographer unknown · September 10, 1940 · Central Medical Library of Warsaw (Główna Biblioteka Lekarska), reference L. 1001, k. 7. Reproduced in Agnieszka Haska, 'Julian Eliasz Chorazycki (1885-1943)', Zaglada Zydow. Studia i Materialy, no. 9 (2013), p. 249, Central Medical Library of Warsaw, L. 1001, k. 7 Public domain View the record: He died four months before the revolt he had begun to plan. The

About a thousand prisoners were in on it. They took weapons from the camp armory and were discovered before they could take the camp. Hundreds rushed the main gate into machine-gun fire, and the camp burned. More than 300 got out and about two thirds were tracked down and killed. Only dozens of Treblinka's prisoners are known to have escaped and survived.

A distant view across flat country toward a low treeline, with a dark column of smoke rising above it into a pale sky. — A Jewish revolt photographed while it was happening. Smoke rising from Treblinka during the prisoner revolt, August 2, 1943. Photographed clandestinely by Franciszek Ząbecki, a Polish railway worker at Treblinka station. Public domain.

Made clandestinely by a witness Franciszek Ząbecki, a Polish railway worker at Treblinka station · August 2, 1943 · Wikimedia Commons Public domain View the record: A Jewish revolt photographed while it was happening. Smoke rising

And after the revolt only sixty-seven people remained. We escaped, three hundred, maybe more. Some didn't want to run. Where to? They had nowhere to run. Everything, there are no ghettos, there's nothing. There are no Jews anymore. So where to run? I ran because of that, I thought I had a father and a mother. And I made it. After four days I was in Warsaw.
Samuel Willenberg, who escaped from Treblinka in the revolt of August 2, 1943. Project Witness testimony, translated from Hebrew.
Spoken in Hebrew. Show the original

ואחרי מרד נשארו רק שישים ושבע איש. ברחנו שלוש מאות, אולי יותר. חלק לא רצה לברוח. לאן? לא היה להם לאן לברוח. הכל, אין גטאות, אין כלום. אין כבר יהודים. אז לאן לברוח? אני ברחתי בגלל זה, חשבתי שיש לי אבא ואמא. והגעתי. אחרי ארבע ימים הייתי בוורשה.
Watch the full testimony. This passage begins at 1:08:33: Samuel Willenberg, Project Witness

Samuel Willenberg got out that day. He was the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt when he died in Israel in 2016, and he spent his later years making sculptures of what he had seen. One of them is the escape.

Many of the prisoners who tried to escape were killed while trying to climb over the wires, and in order to escape I actually had to climb over the bodies of my friends who were killed there. I was wounded in my foot during the escape.
Samuel Willenberg. Yad Vashem Read it at Yad Vashem: Samuel Willenberg

Watch, 1:26:25 Free, no sign-up

Samuel Willenberg, born 1923 in Czestochowa, on Treblinka and the revolt of August 2, 1943. Project Witness.

An elderly man in a light shirt stands beside display boards at an outdoor memorial site, gesturing toward them as people look on. — Seventy years to the day after he ran out through the smoke. Samuel Willenberg at Treblinka, August 2, 2013. Photo: Adrian Grycuk / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL.

Postwar memorial photograph Adrian Grycuk (User:Boston9), cropped by User:Poeticbent · August 2, 2013 · Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 pl: licence for Seventy years to the day after he ran out through the smoke. Samuel View the record: Seventy years to the day after he ran out through the smoke. Samuel

Prisoners of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau revolted on October 7, 1944. That account is on our Auschwitz page.

None of these revolts freed a camp. One of them closed a camp. All three left behind people who could say what the place had been.

A gravel path through woodland lined on both sides with low upright memorial stones, each carrying an inscription. — The remembrance avenue at Sobibor, October 14, 2013, the seventieth anniversary of the uprising. Photo: Anton-kurt / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Postwar memorial photograph Anton-kurt · October 14, 2013 (photographed on the 70th anniversary of the uprising) · Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0: licence for The remembrance avenue at Sobibor, October 14, 2013, the seventieth View the record: The remembrance avenue at Sobibor, October 14, 2013, the seventieth

What the soldiers found

Liberation was not a day. It ran from July 1944 to May 1945, camp by camp, and the killing went on while it happened.

Soviet troops reached Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Between those dates the SS emptied the camps ahead of the advancing armies, on foot and by train. Prisoners probably coined the name for these forced evacuations: death marches. In January 1945 SS reports recorded more than 700,000 people still registered. Historians estimate that nearly half were dead by the end of May.

US Third Army units entered Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, where the camp's underground had taken control before they arrived. Nobody agrees on how many were alive at Bergen-Belsen when the British took it over four days later. USHMM puts it at around 55,000, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial at some 53,000, the National Army Museum at more than 60,000. The camp had collapsed and no accurate count was possible.

So he said with me Vidui. And some five or ten minutes later... he was screaming to me, Victory, English! Victory, English! I didn't know victory, what it is. English I knew, but victory, I didn't know that it is, that is, that you are liberated.
Moshe Kraus, sick with typhus in Bergen-Belsen, who had just said the Vidui, the deathbed confession, with another prisoner when the British arrived. Project Witness testimony. Watch the full testimony. This passage begins at 20:58: Moshe Kraus, Project Witness

A tank moves along a track past a wooden camp gateway and fencing, with a group of figures standing at the roadside. — The first British vehicles at the gate. Every photograph in this section was taken by the army that arrived, so the whole of it is April 1945 and after. None of it shows the five years the camp had already run. A Comet tank of 11th Armoured Division passes the gate at Bergen-Belsen, April 15, 1945. Photograph by Sgt Morris, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 3928. Public domain (Crown copyright expired).

Photographed by liberating forces Sgt Morris, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit · April 15, 1945 · Imperial War Museums, IWM BU 3928 Public domain View the record: The first British vehicles at the gate. Every photograph in this

the gate of the camp ... opened up and a jeep with four military police, the English dressed up in the white belts and the white gloves and the red hats. ... And a truck with loudspeakers behind them, and he said, 'My dear friends...' in every language. In German, in Polish, in Yiddish, you name it. 'From now on you are free.'
Alan Zimm, oral history, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, gift of the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Alan Zimm

Then the part the newsreels do not carry. Around 14,000 people died after liberation, despite immediate British medical relief. Abraham Lewent, liberated from a train that month, gave the reason more exactly than the number does.

And they were so hungry, they didn't care, and they ate it. So hundreds died from eating this stuff, because their stomach was not used to food.
Abraham Lewent. US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Abraham Lewent

Several people sit on the ground beside a barbed wire fence holding bowls and tins, some looking toward the camera. — Survivors eat their first meal after liberation, Bergen-Belsen, April 1945. Photograph by Sgt Harry Oakes, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 4006. Public domain.

Photographed by liberating forces Sgt H Oakes, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit · April 1945 · Imperial War Museums, IWM BU 4006 Public domain View the record: Survivors eat their first meal after liberation, Bergen-Belsen, April

American forces freed roughly 32,000 people at Dachau on April 29 and reached Mauthausen on May 5, where prisoners had already begun taking the camp over. The SS had gassed 1,441 sick prisoners there between April 21 and 25, and on April 28 murdered 33 Upper Austrian Socialists and Communists in the gas chamber, which USHMM records as the last gassing operation in the Third Reich.

Nothing finished when the gates opened.

Children sit at wooden desks in a bare room writing in exercise books while a woman leans over one of them. — Children learn to write at the school opened at Belsen after liberation, June 1945. Photograph by Sgt Hewitt, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 7802. Public domain.

Photographed by liberating forces Sgt Hewitt, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit · June 1945 · Imperial War Museums, IWM BU 7802 Public domain View the record: Children learn to write at the school opened at Belsen after

Three young women in gowns stand together in a bare hospital room while a nurse in an apron attends to one of them. — For some of the people who lived, recovery began outside Germany: Sweden agreed to take 6,000 Belsen survivors for six months. Three Polish girls, former Belsen prisoners, at the Swedish Transit Hospital at Luebeck before traveling to Sweden, July 1945. Photograph by Sgt Evans, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 9221. Public domain.

Photographed by liberating forces Sgt Evans, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit · 1945 · Imperial War Museums, IWM BU 9221 Public domain View the record: For some of the people who lived, recovery began outside Germany:

A crowd stands bareheaded around a low stone monument in an open field, several men holding the corners of a covering cloth. — Their own stone, under their own communal organization, cut with words adapted from Job 16:18. The unveiling of the Jewish memorial stone at Belsen, April 15, 1946. Photograph by Sgt R Makin, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 12581. Public domain.

Photographed by liberating forces Sgt R Makin, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit · April 1946 · Imperial War Museums, IWM BU 12581 Public domain View the record: Their own stone, under their own communal organization, cut with

Bella Jakubowicz Tovey was in a hospital bed at Belsen when a British soldier asked whether he could do anything for her. She asked for warm socks and for sugar.

when the war ended, I...I weighed the equivalent of probably what is 70 pounds, and I was skin and bone. ... I put on the socks and I started to cry because I didn't have any calf. ... the knee-length socks wouldn't stay on.
Bella Jakubowicz Tovey. US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

Every camp, and what kind it was

The table below covers 61 sites, the ones people come looking for by name. Dachau and Bergen-Belsen are in it. So are Treblinka II, Westerbork, Drancy and Alderney.

Read the group headings first. They answer what happened to the person who arrived, and two rows can carry the same death toll and describe completely different places.

Move through time All years

All 61 camps in this directory, 1933 to 1945.

Swipe the map sideways to see all of Europe.

Killing centers 4
Camps that also killed on site 6
Concentration camps 20
Forced-labor camps 14
Transit and internment camps 13
The early camps, 1933 to 1936 4

The 61 camps in the directory below, by the kind of place each one was. Five places are named: the four killing centers, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was a killing center and a concentration camp at once. All five stood on occupied Polish territory. Today's borders are drawn for orientation. Positions are approximate, and where a record gives only a year, the camp appears from December of that year.

Drawn by Project Witness from the directory's own records. Base map: Natural Earth, public domain.

Skip the camp directory

Sixty-one camps.

Most people call every one of these a concentration camp. Four of them were not. At Treblinka II there was no registration, and most people who arrived were dead within two hours.

Killing centers 4: Built to kill. Almost nobody was imprisoned here. Most people were dead within hours of arriving.
Camps that also killed on site 6: A camp that also functioned as a place of mass killing, without being one of the five purpose-built killing centers. This group also includes Auschwitz, which was both a concentration camp and one of the five killing centers, along with a police detention camp, a killing site and a euthanasia killing center.
Concentration camps 20: A prison outside the law. People were held, worked, starved and beaten. Tens of thousands died in them. They were not built to kill on arrival. This group also includes Kauen (Kovno), a sealed Jewish quarter that the SS took over in 1943 and turned into a concentration camp.
Forced-labor camps 14: Built around a job. People were worked until they could not work, and then killed or sent away to die.
Transit and internment camps 13: A waiting room for a train. Conditions were often bearable, because nobody was meant to stay. The toll is measured at the destination. This group also includes four internment camps, often built by a country other than Germany for its own purposes, along with Theresienstadt, a transit ghetto where about 34,000 people died, and Sereď, a labor and transit camp.
The early camps, 1933 to 1936 4: The camps of 1933 to 1936, before the SS standardized the system. Most prisoners were released.

Filled glyphs mark the four families in which most of the dying happened at the sites themselves; outline glyphs mark the transit and internment camps, where most of the deaths tied to the site happened at the far end of a train line, and the early camps, which came before the system killed on that scale.

Where two institutions publish different numbers, this directory prints both with the institutions named, and averages nothing. Most of those gaps are about scope, one museum counting a whole camp system while another counts the main camp. Majdanek is not one of those. There the institutions are counting the same ground.

Where it is today When it opened Order each table Find a camp by name

Showing all 61 camps.

Killing centers 4 of 61

Built to kill. Almost nobody was imprisoned here. Most people were dead within hours of arriving.

How you tell: ask how many prisoners were held there at any one moment; if the honest answer is a work detail of a few hundred to about a thousand prisoners and nobody else, because everyone else was killed on arrival, it was a killing center.

Killing centers. 4 of the 61 camps in this directory. Each row gives the camp, the deaths recorded there with the institution that published the figure, the kind of site it was, and where it is today. Open a record for the full entry.
Camp	What kind of site it was	Where it is today	The full record
Belzec Bełżec Deaths recorded here: approximately 434,500USHMM Where:Poland	killing center Killing center	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District)	Open the recordfor Belzec
Belzec Belzec was built next to a rail siding in southeastern Poland and existed to kill the Jews of Galicia and the Krakow and Lublin districts. Transports arrived, people were told to undress for disinfection, and they were driven into chambers where carbon monoxide from a large engine killed them. Only a few hundred Jewish prisoners were kept alive at a time to empty the chambers and sort belongings, and they were killed and replaced. Notable for the first Operation Reinhard killing center, and the one whose death toll rests on a captured German document. Classification killing center Did it change over time? No. Belzec was the first Operation Reinhard killing center and the first to close, in December 1942. Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District) Today Poland Dates Opened March 1942. Construction began November 1941; deportations and killing began March 1942. Closed December 1942 How it ended Not liberated. The camp was dismantled by the Germans in 1943 and the ground was disguised as a farm. The toll approximately 434,500 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Belzec' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "German authorities had murdered approximately 434,500 Jews at the site." This figure is unusually firm for a killing center because it tracks a contemporaneous German document rather than a postwar estimate. The figure has been revised Early postwar Polish investigations gave approximately 600,000, and Yitzhak Arad's 1984 study in Yad Vashem Studies XVI, drawing on the Polish Main Commission, also used a figure near 600,000. The current figure of approximately 434,500 rests on the Hoefle Telegram, a German radio message of January 11, 1943 that was rediscovered in British archives in 2000 and published by Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2001. It records 434,508 arrivals at Belzec through December 31, 1942, which covers essentially the whole operating life of the camp since it closed that month. The number went down because a German arrival count surfaced, not because the crime shrank. Chances of coming out near-nilBelzec has the smallest documented survivor group of any Operation Reinhard camp. Published survivor counts vary between two and seven. USHMM's Belzec article does not give a number, but its overview of the killing centers says "Only three men are known to have survived." About the photographs of this place There are effectively no photographs of Belzec in operation. Almost every picture that circulates online labeled "Belzec" is either the postwar memorial, a Luftwaffe or postwar aerial, or an image from a different camp. The site today Belzec Museum and Memorial Site, a branch of the State Museum at Majdanek, dedicated June 3, 2004 The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Belzec was among these killing centers. It was one of three killing centers linked to Operation Reinhard..." ... "Carbon monoxide was funneled into the gas chambers, killing all those inside." ... "German authorities had murdered approximately 434,500 Jews at the site." ... "After the Belzec camp was dismantled, the Germans ploughed over the site. They built a manor house and planted trees and crops to disguise the area as a farm." Close the recordfor Belzec
Chelmno Kulmhof, Chełmno nad Nerem, Kulmhof an der Nehr Deaths recorded here: at least 156,300USHMM Where:Poland	killing center Killing center	PolandGerman-annexed Poland (Reichsgau Wartheland)	Open the recordfor Chelmno
Chelmno Chelmno was the first place the Nazis used gas to murder Jews systematically, starting in December 1941. There were no barracks, no roll calls and no prisoner registration. People were brought from the Lodz ghetto and the surrounding region to a manor house, told they were being sent for resettlement and to wash, then loaded into sealed vans that piped engine exhaust into the cargo compartment while driving to a forest clearing four kilometers away. Notable for the first Nazi site to use gas for mass murder of Jews, and the killing ground of the Lodz ghetto. Classification killing center Did it change over time? No. Chelmno was built to kill and did nothing else. It operated in two separate periods, December 1941 to April 1943 and June 1944 to January 1945, with the site partly demolished and then reactivated in between. Where Then German-annexed Poland (Reichsgau Wartheland) Today Poland Dates Opened December 8, 1941. USHMM gives two operating periods: December 1941 to April 1943 and June 1944 to January 1945. Closed January 1945 How it ended January 1945. Not liberated as an operating camp. Soviet forces reached the area in January 1945 after the Germans destroyed the site. The toll at least 156,300 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Chelmno' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "at least 152,000 Jews and 4,300 Roma at Chelmno," for a total of "at least 156,300 people." This is a floor, not a count. Chances of coming out near-nilUSHMM: "seven Jewish men are known to have escaped from Chelmno." Out of more than 150,000 people brought there. About the photographs of this place There is almost no photography of Chelmno. The most reproduced images are a Magirus-Deutz gas van found at Kolo and German-made photographs of deportation columns leaving the Lodz ghetto. Both are perpetrator or perpetrator-adjacent material, and the gas van photograph in particular is often captioned as if it were taken at Chelmno when its provenance is a postwar discovery. A survivor's words How did I know my mother arrived at Chelmno? There were many handbags, a mountain of handbags. Once, I found a handbag with my mother's pictures and all her documents. Szymon Srebrnik · Source The site today Museum of the Former Extermination Camp in Chelmno on Ner, a branch of the Martyrological Museum in Zabikowo The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "one of five killing centers that Nazi Germany created as part of the 'Final Solution'" ... "gas chambers were located in the cargo area of large vans. The victims were murdered with carbon monoxide gas" ... "at least 152,000 Jews and 4,300 Roma at Chelmno" ... "seven Jewish men are known to have escaped from Chelmno." Close the recordfor Chelmno
Sobibor Sobibór, SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor Deaths recorded here: at least 167,000USHMM Where:Poland	killing center Killing center	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District)	Open the recordfor Sobibor
Sobibor Sobibor sat on a rail spur in a wooded corner of eastern Poland and existed to kill Jews from Poland, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia and the occupied Soviet territories. Arrivals were marched down a fenced path the SS called the tube, into chambers labeled as showers, and killed with carbon monoxide piped from an engine. On October 14, 1943 the prisoners kept alive to run the camp killed eleven SS men and broke out, and the SS shut the place down and erased it. Notable for the most successful uprising in any Nazi camp, which ended the camp's existence. Classification killing center Also functioned as small forced-labor detail kept alive to run the killing process Did it change over time? No. In summer 1943 the SS began converting part of the camp into a depot for captured Soviet ammunition, but the site's purpose remained killing until the uprising ended it. Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District) Today Poland Dates Opened April 1942. Killing operations ran from April 1942 until mid-October 1943, when the camp was closed following the prisoner uprising. Closed October 1943 How it ended Not liberated. The Germans dismantled the camp after the October 14, 1943 uprising and planted it with pine trees. The toll at least 167,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Sobibor' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "From April 1942 until mid-October 1943, the German SS and their auxiliaries killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor." Stated as a floor. The figure has been revised Readers will encounter about 250,000, which comes from Yitzhak Arad's 1984 study in Yad Vashem Studies XVI citing the Polish Main Commission, and from an undated Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center entry. The lower current figure draws in part on the Hoefle Telegram of January 11, 1943, rediscovered in British archives in 2000 and published in 2001, which supplies contemporaneous German arrival counts that did not exist when the older estimates were made. Note that the same body of new evidence pushed Treblinka's figure up, not only Belzec's and Sobibor's down. Chances of coming out near-nilUSHMM: "Some 50 prisoners escaped Sobibor and survived the war." Around 300 broke out on October 14, 1943; most were hunted down. About the photographs of this place The photographic record of Sobibor changed in 2020, when 361 photographs from the private collection of deputy commandant Johann Niemann were published and donated to USHMM. They include the only known images taken inside the camp. Every one of them is perpetrator photography made by an SS officer for his own album. The site today Museum of the Former Sobibor Death Camp, a branch of the State Museum at Majdanek The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "From April 1942 until mid-October 1943, the German SS and their auxiliaries killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor." ... "On October 14, 1943, with approximately 600 prisoners left in the camp, those who knew the plan initiated the revolt. The prisoners killed 11 German personnel and a few Trawniki-trained guards. Around 300 prisoners succeeded in breaking out." ... "Some 50 prisoners escaped Sobibor and survived the war." ... "As at Belzec and Treblinka, the area was plowed over. The site of the Sobibor killing center was planted with a pine forest." Close the recordfor Sobibor
Treblinka II Treblinka killing center, Treblinka B Deaths recorded here: approximately 925,000 Jews, plus an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of warUSHMM Where:Poland	killing center Killing center	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Warsaw District)	Open the recordfor Treblinka II
Treblinka II Treblinka II was a killing installation of about 1,312 by 1,968 feet, roughly the area of thirty-four soccer fields, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence woven with branches and watched from towers twenty-six feet high. It had a reception area, a small living area for the prisoners kept alive to work, and a killing area. Most people who arrived were dead within two hours. There was no registration, no tattoo, no prisoner number. Notable for the deadliest of the Operation Reinhard killing centers and the destination of most of the Warsaw ghetto. Classification killing center Also functioned as small forced-labor detail kept alive to run the killing process Did it change over time? No. Treblinka II was a killing center from the day it opened in July 1942 until it was dismantled in the fall of 1943. It is a separate installation from Treblinka I, the forced-labor camp about a mile and a half away. Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Warsaw District) Today Poland Dates Opened July 1942. Killing began in late July 1942; the camp was dismantled in the fall of 1943. Closed November 1943 How it ended Not liberated. The Germans demolished the camp, sowed lupine over the ground and installed a farmer to disguise it. The toll approximately 925,000 Jews, plus an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Treblinka' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "the camp personnel had murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews, as well as an unknown number of Poles, Roma, and Soviet POWs." More Jews were murdered at Treblinka II than at any Nazi site except Auschwitz-Birkenau. The figure has been revised Yitzhak Arad's 1984 figure was about 850,000. The current figure is higher, not lower, and draws in part on the same new documentary evidence that lowered Belzec and Sobibor: the Hoefle Telegram of January 11, 1943, published in 2001. So the revisions run in both directions, on the strength of evidence rather than in one convenient direction. Chances of coming out near-nilAbout 1,000 prisoners took part in the August 2, 1943 uprising and more than 300 got out; roughly two thirds of those were hunted down and killed. Fewer than 100 people are known to have survived Treblinka II. About the photographs of this place There is no legitimate photograph of the killing process at Treblinka. The wartime images that exist come overwhelmingly from the private album of deputy commandant Kurt Franz, later used as evidence at his trial, and from Allied and Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance. Franz's album is perpetrator photography of SS men at leisure and of the camp zoo. Photographs of the 17,000-stone memorial field are documentary. The site today Treblinka Museum (Muzeum Treblinka), Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom. The memorial covers 22,000 square meters of concrete set with 17,000 stones; 216 carry the names of towns whose Jews were deported here, and only one carries a person's name, Janusz Korczak. The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The killing center, referred to as Treblinka II, was constructed in the summer of 1942." ... "By the time the Treblinka killing center was dismantled in the fall of 1943, the camp personnel had murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews, as well as an unknown number of Poles, Roma, and Soviet POWs." ... "On August 2, 1943, prisoners quietly seized weapons from the camp armory. However, they were discovered before they could take over the camp." ... "Lupine flowers were sown on the grounds, and an ethnic German farmer was installed on the property to camouflage the reality of what had occurred at this site." Close the recordfor Treblinka II

Camps that also killed on site 6 of 61

A camp that also functioned as a place of mass killing, without being one of the five purpose-built killing centers. This group also includes Auschwitz, which was both a concentration camp and one of the five killing centers, along with a police detention camp, a killing site and a euthanasia killing center.

How you tell: ask whether killing people was itself one of the site's purposes, not only a result of how prisoners were treated; if it was, and the site is not one of the four killing centers, it belongs here.

Camps that also killed on site. 6 of the 61 camps in this directory. Each row gives the camp, the deaths recorded there with the institution that published the figure, the kind of site it was, and where it is today. Open a record for the full entry.
Camp	What kind of site it was	Where it is today	The full record
Auschwitz Oświęcim, Auschwitz-Birkenau, KL Auschwitz Deaths recorded here: approximately 1.1 millionUSHMM Where:Poland	concentration camp and killing center Camp and killing site	PolandGerman-annexed Poland (Upper Silesia)	Open the recordfor Auschwitz
Auschwitz Auschwitz was three main camps and dozens of subcamps: Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the killing center; and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp attached to the IG Farben plant. It is the one site where the two institutions this page distinguishes were physically fused, and that is why so many people assume every camp worked the way Auschwitz did. Most did not. Notable for the largest of the camps and the only killing center that was also a functioning concentration camp for tens of thousands of registered prisoners. Read the full Auschwitz page Classification concentration camp and killing center Also functioned as concentration camp; killing center; forced-labor camp; network of more than 40 subcamps Did it change over time? Yes. Established as a concentration camp in spring 1940, Auschwitz became a killing center as well when mass gassing began at Birkenau in 1942. The two functions ran side by side on the same complex until the end. Where Then German-annexed Poland (Upper Silesia) Today Poland Dates Opened May 1940 Closed January 1945 How it ended January 27, 1945. Soviet forces (Red Army) The toll approximately 1.1 million Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Auschwitz' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "approximately 1.1 million people were murdered. The victims included: about one million Jews, most of whom were murdered in gas chambers; 70,000-75,000 ethnic Poles; about 21,000 Roma; more than 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war; and 10,000-15,000 prisoners of other nationalities." A caution about the numbers Readers may have seen four million, a figure placed on the Birkenau memorial by the postwar Polish authorities and removed in 1990. That number was never the finding of independent scholarship. Chances of coming out varies by whether a person was registered as a prisoner or sent straight to the gas chambers; for those selected for the gas on arrival, near-nil Subcamps more than 40 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place Two perpetrator collections dominate the visual record and both are constantly republished without their framing. The Auschwitz Album is a set of roughly 200 photographs made by SS men in May 1944 documenting the arrival and selection of Hungarian Jews; it is the only extensive photographic record of an arrival at a killing center and it was made by the killers. The Hoecker Album, identified in 2007, shows Auschwitz SS officers relaxing, singing and eating blueberries at a retreat while the gassings ran. The site today Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Auschwitz was a Nazi concentration camp complex located in German-occupied Poland. Unlike other Nazi concentration camps, it also included a killing center." ... "The SS established the Auschwitz concentration camp in spring 1940." ... "On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated approximately 7,000 prisoners from Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Monowitz." Close the recordfor Auschwitz
Hartheim Schloss Hartheim, Hartheim Castle, T4 killing center Hartheim Deaths recorded here: about 30,000 people murdered at Hartheim between 1940 and 1944Hartheim Castle memorial Where:Austria	euthanasia killing center Camp and killing site	AustriaAustria (annexed to Germany)	Open the recordfor Hartheim
Hartheim Hartheim is a Renaissance castle outside Linz where the Nazi state gassed disabled people. It is in this directory for one reason: it is the link between the murder of the disabled and the murder of camp prisoners. The gas chamber technique, the personnel and the deception all moved from the euthanasia centers into the camp system, and camps including Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen sent prisoners here to be killed when they could no longer work. A reader who thinks the camps invented gassing has the sequence backward. Notable for the bridge between the euthanasia program and the camps, both in method and in personnel. Classification euthanasia killing center Also functioned as T4 euthanasia gassing installation; killing site for concentration camp prisoners under Operation 14f13 Did it change over time? Yes, and the change is why it belongs in a camp directory. Hartheim was built to kill disabled people under the T4 program. From 1941 it was also used to kill concentration camp prisoners from Mauthausen, Gusen and Dachau who were judged unfit to work, under the program the SS designated 14f13. Where Then Austria (annexed to Germany) Today Austria Dates Opened May 1940 Closed December 1944 How it ended Not applicable. The installation was dismantled and the building returned to other use before the end of the war. The toll about 30,000 people murdered at Hartheim between 1940 and 1944 (Hartheim Castle memorial), among them more than 2,500 Dachau prisoners (USHMM); one of six T4 gassing centers, which by T4's own internal count killed 70,273 people from January 1940 to August 1941; historians estimate the Euthanasia Program killed 250,000 people in all its phases Figures from Hartheim Castle memorial; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Euthanasia Program' and 'Dachau' What the institutions actually say USHMM gives program-wide figures: "70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons" in the first phase and "the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals." For Hartheim specifically USHMM gives only the Dachau transfer figure of over 2,500. Chances of coming out near-nil About the photographs of this place Photographs of the castle show a Renaissance building and nothing of what was done inside it. Photographs of victims of the euthanasia program were frequently made as clinical or eugenic documentation by the institutions that killed them, and carry the framing of the people who classified these lives as not worth living. The site today Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim (Hartheim Castle Place of Learning and Remembrance) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM lists the six T4 gassing centers as "Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin; Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany; Bernburg, in Saxony; Sonnenstein, also in Saxony; Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria; and Hadamar, in Hessen." First phase: "70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons." All phases: "the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals." USHMM, Dachau: prisoners were transferred to Hartheim, "where over 2,500 Dachau prisoners were murdered." Close the recordfor Hartheim
Jasenovac Jasenovac camp complex, Logor Jasenovac Deaths recorded here: between 77,000 and 99,000USHMM Where:Croatia	concentration camp and killing site Camp and killing site	CroatiaIndependent State of Croatia (Axis client state)	Open the recordfor Jasenovac
Jasenovac Jasenovac was not run by Germans. It was built and operated by the Ustaša, the Croatian fascist movement that governed the Independent State of Croatia as an Axis client, and it was guarded by Croatian political police and Ustaša militia. Its principal victims were Serbs, then Roma, then Jews. It is in this directory because it shows that the camp system extended beyond German hands, and because the arguments over its death toll are among the most politicized in the field. Notable for an Axis client state's own camp complex, and the most politically contested death toll in Holocaust-era scholarship. Classification concentration camp and killing site Also functioned as concentration camp complex of five detention facilities; killing site; forced-labor camp Where Then Independent State of Croatia (Axis client state) Today Croatia Dates Opened August 1941 Closed April 1945 How it ended May 1945. Yugoslav Partisans overran the site in early May 1945 after the Ustaša destroyed it and killed the remaining prisoners. The toll between 77,000 and 99,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Jasenovac' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "It is presently estimated that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945," comprising between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbs, between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma, and between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims. A caution about the numbers USHMM states plainly that "Determining the number of victims for Yugoslavia, for Croatia, and for Jasenovac is highly problematic" because documents were destroyed and because scholarship on the question has been shaped by ideology. Figures in circulation range from tens of thousands to over 700,000, and the extremes in both directions are political rather than evidentiary. Chances of coming out near-nil Subcamps five detention facilities in the complex Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place Imagery of Jasenovac is contested territory. Photographs have been misattributed in both directions in Serbian and Croatian nationalist argument, some circulating images are of other sites entirely, and the memorial itself has been the subject of decades of political dispute. The site today Jasenovac Memorial Site (Spomen-područje Jasenovac) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Jasenovac camp complex consisted of five detention facilities established between August 1941 and February 1942 by the authorities of the so-called Independent State of Croatia." ... "The camps were guarded by Croatian political police and personnel of the Ustasa militia." ... "It is presently estimated that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945." ... "Determining the number of victims for Yugoslavia, for Croatia, and for Jasenovac is highly problematic." Close the recordfor Jasenovac
Maly Trostinets Maly Trostenets, Малы Трасцянец, Trostinets Deaths recorded here: tens of thousands, most of them Jews USHMM more than 150,000 victims of all groups 2002 memorial stone in the Blagovshchina Forest Figures in conflict Where:Belarus	killing site Camp and killing site	BelarusGerman-occupied Belorussia (Reichskommissariat Ostland)	Open the recordfor Maly Trostinets
Maly Trostinets Maly Trostinets was a former collective farm outside Minsk that the Germans used as a killing ground. Jews from the Minsk ghetto and Jews deported by train from Vienna, Germany, the Protectorate and elsewhere in Central Europe were taken to the Blagovshchina forest and shot, or killed in gas vans on the way. For Viennese Jewry in particular it was a principal destination, which is why it is far better known in Austria than in the English-speaking world. Notable for the principal killing site for Jews deported from Vienna, and a death toll still genuinely in dispute. Classification killing site Also functioned as killing site by shooting and gas van; small forced-labor estate Where Then German-occupied Belorussia (Reichskommissariat Ostland) Today Belarus Dates Opened May 1942 Closed June 1944 How it ended July 1944. Soviet forces took Minsk on July 3, 1944. The toll tens of thousands, most of them Jews (USHMM); no agreed total. Yad Vashem documents about 10,000 inmates of the Minsk ghettos shot there on July 28 to 31, 1942, at least 13,500 German, Austrian and Czech Jews murdered there between May and October 1942, and at least 4,000 more in September 1943; a 2002 memorial stone in the Blagovshchina Forest gives more than 150,000 victims of all groups Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Yad Vashem, Untold Stories: The Murder Sites of the Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Former USSR A caution about the numbers No total is agreed. A 2002 memorial stone in the Blagovshchina Forest gives more than 150,000 victims of all groups. USHMM gives tens of thousands, most of them Jews. Chances of coming out near-nil About the photographs of this place The photographs of charred remains at Maly Trostinets were made by Soviet investigators after liberation, depict human remains, and were produced as evidence for a state commission whose figures are now questioned. The site today Maly Trostenets memorial complex, opened in stages from 2015 How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM holds the photograph "Charred remains of victims at Maly Trostinets." Yad Vashem's Untold Stories project documents the site under the entry "Murder Story of Minsk Jews in Maly Trostenets-Blagovshchina (Gas Vans)." Close the recordfor Maly Trostinets
Risiera di San Sabba Risiera, Polizeihaftlager San Sabba, San Sabba Deaths recorded here: about 5,000 USHMM, most of them political prisoners no precise count is possible, with at least 2,000 estimated at the 1976 trial and 4,000 to 5,000 by some historians Civico Museo della Risiera di San Sabba Figures in conflict Where:Italy	police detention camp and killing site Camp and killing site	ItalyGerman-occupied Italy (Operational Zone Adriatic Littoral)	Open the recordfor Risiera di San Sabba
Risiera di San Sabba San Sabba was a disused rice-husking plant on the edge of Trieste that the SS turned into a detention camp with a crematorium, the only Nazi camp on Italian soil with one. It held and killed partisans, political prisoners and Jews from northeastern Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, and it was the point from which the Jews of Trieste were deported. Notable for the only Nazi camp in Italy with a crematorium. Classification police detention camp and killing site Also functioned as police transit camp; concentration camp; killing site with a crematorium; deportation point for the Jews of Trieste Where Then German-occupied Italy (Operational Zone Adriatic Littoral) Today Italy Dates Opened October 1943 Closed April 29, 1945 How it ended April 29, 1945. Yugoslav Partisan and Allied forces entered Trieste at the end of April 1945; the SS blew up the crematorium on April 29, 1945 before withdrawing. The toll about 5,000, most of them political prisoners (USHMM); the Risiera's own museum says no precise count is possible, with at least 2,000 estimated at the 1976 trial and 4,000 to 5,000 by some historians Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Italy'; Civico Museo della Risiera di San Sabba What the institutions actually say USHMM: "about 5,000 persons, most of whom were political prisoners," were tortured and murdered there. Separately on the Jews of Trieste: "the SS and police in Trieste concentrated some 1,200 Jews, mostly from Trieste, in San Sabba, and deported 1,122 from San Sabba to Auschwitz," of whom "eighty-five survived." Chances of coming out near-nil for those killed on site; near-nil for those deported to Auschwitz, where 85 of 1,122 survived The site today Civico Museo della Risiera di San Sabba, a national monument since 1965 The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "the SS established the police transit camp and concentration camp La Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, where they tortured and murdered about 5,000 persons, most of whom were political prisoners." ... "the SS and police in Trieste concentrated some 1,200 Jews, mostly from Trieste, in San Sabba, and deported 1,122 from San Sabba to Auschwitz" with "eighty-five survived." Close the recordfor Risiera di San Sabba
Sajmište Semlin, Sajmiste, Judenlager Semlin, Staro Sajmište, Anhaltelager Semlin Deaths recorded here: around 6,280 people, virtually all Jews and mostly women and children, were killed by gas van between March and May 1942 (USHMM), in addition to deaths in the later phase of the camp Where:Serbia	concentration camp and killing site Camp and killing site	SerbiaIndependent State of Croatia territory administratively, German-occupied Serbia operationally (Belgrade Fair grounds across the Sava from Belgrade)	Open the recordfor Sajmište
Sajmište Sajmište was built on the Belgrade Fair exhibition grounds, modernist pavilions from the 1930s, and used to hold the Jewish women, children and elderly of Serbia after the men had already been shot. Between March and May 1942 a gas van drove between the camp and the village of Jajinci several times a day, killing the prisoners on the way. Serbia was declared free of Jews in the summer of 1942, one of the earliest such declarations anywhere. Notable for the murder of almost the entire remaining Jewish population of Serbia by gas van, and the near-total absence of the site from popular Holocaust memory. Classification concentration camp and killing site Also functioned as camp for Jewish women, children and the elderly; killing site by gas van; detention camp for partisans and forced laborers after May 1942 Did it change over time? Yes, and explicitly. The Historical Archives of Belgrade record that after the last Jewish prisoners were killed, the camp "changed its purpose: it was no longer Judenlager, camp for Jews, but Anhalt Lager, a temporary camp for political detainees, captured partisans and forced labor prisoners." Where Then Independent State of Croatia territory administratively, German-occupied Serbia operationally (Belgrade Fair grounds across the Sava from Belgrade) Today Serbia Dates Opened December 8, 1941 Closed July 26, 1944 How it ended October 1944. The site was abandoned on July 26, 1944; Belgrade was taken by Yugoslav Partisan and Soviet forces in October 1944. The toll around 6,280 people, virtually all Jews and mostly women and children, were killed by gas van between March and May 1942 (USHMM), in addition to deaths in the later phase of the camp Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Historical Archives of Belgrade, 'Concentration Camp at Sajmište' What the institutions actually say The Historical Archives of Belgrade record roughly 5,300 Jewish prisoners, predominantly women, children and the elderly, plus roughly 600 Roma, interned from December 1941, and the systematic killing of the Jewish prisoners by gas van from March 18 to May 10, 1942. The first victims, from March 18 to 25, 1942, were 700 to 800 hospital staff and patients. Chances of coming out near-nil for the Jewish prisoners About the photographs of this place Sajmište has a distinct postwar memory problem rather than a perpetrator-photography problem. For decades the Yugoslav and later Serbian framing of the site emphasized Partisan and Serbian victims of its second phase, and the killing of Serbia's Jews there was largely absent from public commemoration. Photographs of the site and its memorials therefore carry a commemorative framing that may not mention the Jewish victims at all. The site today The former fairground buildings still stand in New Belgrade; a memorial complex has been in development since 2020. The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "March 18-25, 1942: Hospital staff and patients (700-800 individuals) were the first victims" ... "Gas van went from Sajmiste camp to the village of Jajince several times a day" ... After May 10, 1942 the camp "changed its purpose: it was no longer Judenlager, camp for Jews, but Anhalt Lager, a temporary camp for political detainees, captured partisans and forced labor prisoners." Close the recordfor Sajmište

Concentration camps 20 of 61

A prison outside the law. People were held, worked, starved and beaten. Tens of thousands died in them. They were not built to kill on arrival. This group also includes Kauen (Kovno), a sealed Jewish quarter that the SS took over in 1943 and turned into a concentration camp.

How you tell: ask whether arrivals were registered and kept alive to be used; if they were entered on the camp roll, assigned a number and put to work, it was a concentration camp.

Concentration camps. 20 of the 61 camps in this directory. Each row gives the camp, the deaths recorded there with the institution that published the figure, the kind of site it was, and where it is today. Open a record for the full entry.
Camp	What kind of site it was	Where it is today	The full record
Bergen-Belsen Belsen, Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen Deaths recorded here: at least 52,000 in the concentration camp, out of 120,000 imprisoned thereBergen-Belsen Memorial Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Lower Saxony)	Open the recordfor Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen Bergen-Belsen is the camp most Americans and Britons picture when they hear the word, because the British Army filmed it. It was not a killing center. It became a place of mass death in its last four months, when the SS emptied camps in the east and dumped tens of thousands of starving people here with no food, no water and no sanitation, and typhus did the rest. Roughly 55,000 people were found alive on April 15, 1945, and more than 13,000 of them died after liberation. Notable for the camp the British liberated and filmed, where Anne and Margot Frank died. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as prisoner-of-war camp; exchange camp for Jews held as bargaining assets; men's recovery camp; women's camp; reception camp for evacuation transports; displaced persons camp after liberation Did it change over time? Yes, more than almost any other site. It began in 1940 as a Wehrmacht POW camp. In April 1943 the SS took over the southern section and created a detention camp for Jews held for possible exchange. A men's camp was added from the end of March 1944 and a women's camp in August 1944. From December 1944 it became the dumping ground for evacuation transports from camps in the east, and that is when it collapsed into mass death from starvation and typhus. It was never a killing center and had no gas chamber. Where Then Germany (Lower Saxony) Today Germany Dates Opened April 1943. The SS camp dates from April 1943. The Wehrmacht POW camp on the site dates from 1940, and at least 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war died across the Bergen-Belsen, Oerbke and Wietzendorf POW camps. Closed April 15, 1945 How it ended April 15, 1945. British Army (11th Armoured Division), under a local truce negotiated with the German command The toll at least 52,000 in the concentration camp, out of 120,000 imprisoned there Figures from Bergen-Belsen Memorial and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum What the institutions actually say Bergen-Belsen Memorial: "A total of 120,000 people from nearly every European country had been imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. More than 52,000 of these men, women, and children perished." USHMM gives approximately 50,000 for the camp complex, of which about 37,000 between May 1943 and April 15, 1945 and more than 13,000 after liberation. The SS destroyed the camp registry before the handover, so no complete count is possible, and the memorial has recovered only around 11,500 names since 1990. Chances of coming out routine in the exchange camp of 1943 and 1944; near-nil in the reception camp of early 1945This camp changed so completely between 1943 and 1945 that a single survival figure is misleading. Between July 1943 and December 1944 at least 14,600 Jewish prisoners, including 2,750 children, were sent to the exchange camp, and around 2,560 were actually released. About the photographs of this place The British Army Film and Photographic Unit's material from April and May 1945 is the single most reproduced body of Holocaust imagery in the English-speaking world, and much of it shows corpses and mass graves. Because Belsen was filmed and Treblinka was not, Belsen's imagery has come to stand in for the entire Holocaust, which quietly teaches that the Holocaust looked like emaciated survivors behind wire rather than like a rail platform where people were dead within two hours. The site today Bergen-Belsen Memorial (Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen), Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text Memorial: "In April 1943, the SS took over the southern section of the Bergen-Belsen POW camp from the Wehrmacht and established the Bergen-Belsen 'detention camp'" ... "Between July 1943 and December 1944, at least 14,600 Jewish prisoners," among them 2,750 children, were deported there, and "around 2,560 Jewish prisoners were ever released." ... "Starting in December 1944, at least 85,000 men, women, and children were sent to Bergen-Belsen on more than 100 transports." ... "A total of 120,000 people from nearly every European country had been imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. More than 52,000 of these men, women, and children perished." ... "On 15 April 1945, British troops liberated the camp." Close the recordfor Bergen-Belsen
Buchenwald Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, Ettersberg Deaths recorded here: at least 56,000USHMM Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Thuringia, near Weimar)	Open the recordfor Buchenwald
Buchenwald Buchenwald was built on the Ettersberg hill above Weimar, a few miles from Goethe's oak. It held political prisoners, Jews, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men and Soviet prisoners of war, and by 1944 more than half its prisoners were in outlying subcamps making weapons. Its underground prisoner organization was the most developed of any camp, which is why it could act on April 11, 1945. Notable for the organized prisoner resistance that acted at liberation, and the children's block that kept several hundred boys alive. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp for the armaments industry; site of medical experiments; transit point for prisoners moved west in 1944 and 1945 Did it change over time? Yes in population and purpose of labor. It opened in July 1937 holding German political prisoners and by 1944 was an armaments labor hub with at least 88 subcamps. Women were not part of the Buchenwald system until 1943. Where Then Germany (Thuringia, near Weimar) Today Germany Dates Opened July 1937 Closed April 11, 1945 How it ended April 11, 1945. United States Army, 6th Armored Division, Third Army. The prisoner resistance organization moved first as the US forces approached. USHMM: "Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in the camp." The Buchenwald Memorial records that the International Camp Committee mobilized its resistance on April 11, 1945, and armed prisoners were photographed guarding captured SS men. The toll at least 56,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Buchenwald' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system. Some 11,000 of them were Jews." Out of some 250,000 imprisoned. The Buchenwald Memorial gives a total prisoner figure of 277,800 across the system. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps at least 88 (USHMM); the Buchenwald Memorial documents 139 satellite camps. The two figures count different things: USHMM counts subcamps administered by the main camp during the war, the memorial counts all satellite camps across the system's life. Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Together with its many satellite camps, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps established within the German borders of 1937." ... "Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald." ... "During World War II, the Buchenwald main camp administered at least 88 subcamps." ... "The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system. Some 11,000 of them were Jews." ... "Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in the camp." Close the recordfor Buchenwald
Dachau Konzentrationslager Dachau, KZ Dachau Deaths recorded here: at least 40,000USHMM Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Bavaria)	Open the recordfor Dachau
Dachau Dachau was the first camp the Nazi state built, and it ran for all twelve years of the regime, from its second month to the last days of the war. It was a prison outside the law: no charge, no trial, no release date. Commandant Theodor Eicke wrote the punishment regulations here in October 1933, then took them to the rest of the system when Himmler made him Inspector of Concentration Camps, and Dachau became the school where SS camp guards were trained. Notable for the first regular Nazi concentration camp and the model for all the others. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp; SS training center; site of medical experiments; model and template for the whole camp system Did it change over time? Yes, in who it held rather than in what it was. It opened in March 1933 for German political prisoners and by 1945 held tens of thousands of people from across Europe, most of them not German and many of them Jewish. It was never a killing center. Where Then Germany (Bavaria) Today Germany Dates Opened March 22, 1933. USHMM: "On March 22, 1933, the first prisoner transports arrived at the camp." Closed April 29, 1945 How it ended April 29, 1945. United States Army The toll at least 40,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Dachau' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "Scholars believe that at least 40,000 prisoners died at Dachau." Out of more than 200,000 registered between 1933 and 1945. Stated as a floor. Chances of coming out hardDachau ran for twelve years and most people sent there in the 1930s came out. The camp of 1944 and 1945, packed with evacuation transports and typhus, was a different place from the camp of 1934. Subcamps some 140 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place Dachau's liberation on April 29, 1945, produced some of the most reproduced atrocity photography of the war, including the death train of open rail cars filled with bodies outside the camp. Those photographs were made by US Army photographers days after most of the deaths. The gas chamber in Barrack X is one of the most misread structures in Holocaust memory. USHMM states plainly: "There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings." Prisoners judged too weak to work were instead sent to Hartheim in Austria and killed there. The site today Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Dachau concentration camp was established in March 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist (Nazi) government." ... "On April 29, 1945, American forces liberated Dachau." ... "Dachau alone had some 140 subcamps, mainly in southern Bavaria." ... "The number of prisoners incarcerated in Dachau between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 200,000." ... "Scholars believe that at least 40,000 prisoners died at Dachau." ... "There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings." Close the recordfor Dachau
Flossenbürg Flossenbuerg, Konzentrationslager Flossenbürg Deaths recorded here: an estimated 30,000USHMM Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Bavaria, near the Czech border)	Open the recordfor Flossenbürg
Flossenbürg Flossenbürg was built beside a granite quarry in the hills of the Upper Palatinate, close enough to the Czech border that its subcamps eventually spread across both sides. It began as a camp for men the SS classified as criminals and expanded into a labor complex assembling Messerschmitt aircraft. In April 1945 the SS hanged several prisoners connected to the July 20 plot against Hitler, among them Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Notable for the granite quarry, and the executions of Canaris and Bonhoeffer in April 1945. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as granite quarry forced labor; aircraft assembly for Messerschmitt; execution site for prisoners linked to the July 20, 1944 plot Did it change over time? Yes in the labor it existed for. Until mid-1943 the quarry occupied about half the prisoners; after that the camp turned to aircraft production and its subcamp network grew to around 100. Where Then Germany (Bavaria, near the Czech border) Today Germany Dates Opened May 3, 1938. USHMM: the site was determined March 24, 1938 and the first prisoners arrived May 3, 1938. Closed April 23, 1945 How it ended April 23, 1945. United States Army, 358th and 359th Infantry Regiments, 90th Infantry Division USHMM: "just over 1,500 prisoners remained in the camp." The toll an estimated 30,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Flossenbürg' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "An estimated 30,000 prisoners died in Flossenbürg and its subcamps or on the evacuation routes, including 3,515 Jews." The figure includes deaths on the evacuation marches, which many camp figures do not. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps around 100 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "An estimated 30,000 prisoners died in Flossenbürg and its subcamps or on the evacuation routes, including 3,515 Jews." ... "The SS authorities established around 100 subcamps of Flossenbürg." ... "When members of the 358th and 359th US Infantry Regiments (90th US Infantry Division) liberated Flossenbürg on April 23, 1945, just over 1,500 prisoners remained in the camp." ... "The SS hanged several prominent prisoners linked, however tenuously, to the July 20, 1944 conspiracy, including former military intelligence (Abwehr) chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, his deputy, Major-General Hans Oster, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer." Close the recordfor Flossenbürg
Gross-Rosen Groß-Rosen, Rogoźnica, Konzentrationslager Gross-Rosen Deaths recorded here: at least 40,000USHMM Where:Poland	concentration camp Concentration camp	PolandGermany (Lower Silesia)	Open the recordfor Gross-Rosen
Gross-Rosen Gross-Rosen started as a quarry detail sent out from Sachsenhausen and became one of the largest camp systems in the east, with almost a hundred subcamps scattered across Lower Silesia and the Sudetenland making aircraft parts, munitions and textiles. In the last year it became overwhelmingly a camp of Jewish women. In January 1945 it absorbed thousands of prisoners marched west from Auschwitz and Blechhammer, and then was itself evacuated. Notable for the Silesian subcamp network, and the destination of the January 1945 marches out of Auschwitz. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as granite quarry forced labor; armaments production across at least 97 subcamps; destination for evacuation marches from Auschwitz and Blechhammer in January 1945 Did it change over time? Yes. Established in 1940 as a subcamp of Sachsenhausen, it became an independent camp in 1941. By January 1945 nearly 26,000 of its 76,728 prisoners were women, most of them Jewish, a demographic reversal from its early years. Where Then Germany (Lower Silesia) Today Poland Dates Opened August 1940 Closed February 13, 1945 How it ended February 13, 1945. Soviet forces (Red Army) USHMM: "Soviet forces liberated the main Gross-Rosen camp on February 13, 1945." Many subcamps were evacuated westward before that date. The toll at least 40,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Gross-Rosen' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "It is estimated that of the 120,000 prisoners who passed through the Gross-Rosen camp system, at least 40,000 died either in Gross-Rosen or during the evacuation." Includes evacuation deaths. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps at least 97 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Gross-Rosen concentration camp was originally established in 1940 as a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp." ... "It is estimated that of the 120,000 prisoners who passed through the Gross-Rosen camp system, at least 40,000 died either in Gross-Rosen or during the evacuation." ... "At least 97 subcamps" ... "Soviet forces liberated the main Gross-Rosen camp on February 13, 1945." Close the recordfor Gross-Rosen
Gunskirchen Gunskirchen Lager, Waldlager Deaths recorded here: between 2,700 and 5,000 died in the campMauthausen Committee Austria Where:Austria	concentration camp Concentration camp	AustriaAustria (annexed to Germany)	Open the recordfor Gunskirchen
Gunskirchen Gunskirchen was a set of wooden huts in a wood, built at the end of 1944 and then filled in April 1945 with thousands of Hungarian Jews marched there from Mauthausen. There was no water and effectively no food. It is included here because it is where a great many people who had survived everything else died in the final three weeks, and because the American units that found it produced some of the most widely circulated liberation accounts. Notable for the end point of the April 1945 Mauthausen evacuation marches. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as subcamp of Mauthausen; final destination of evacuation marches from Mauthausen in April 1945 Where Then Austria (annexed to Germany) Today Austria Dates Opened April 1945 Closed May 5, 1945 How it ended May 5, 1945. United States Army, 71st Infantry Division The toll between 2,700 and 5,000 died in the camp (Mauthausen Committee Austria); more than 1,000 more died in the months after liberation (USHMM) Figures from Mauthausen Committee Austria; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Chances of coming out near-nil About the photographs of this place As at Ebensee, the American liberation photography here is dominated by images of the dead and dying. The site today Gunskirchen memorial in the Hochholz wood How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text The Mauthausen Memorial identifies Gunskirchen among its 47 subcamps. Close the recordfor Gunskirchen
Gusen Gusen I, Gusen II, Gusen III, Bergkristall, Langenstein Deaths recorded here: some 35,000USHMM Where:Austria	concentration camp Concentration camp	AustriaAustria (annexed to Germany)	Open the recordfor Gusen
Gusen Gusen was three miles from Mauthausen and killed more people than most main camps. Prisoners quarried granite at Gusen and Kastenhof, and from November 1943 dug the Bergkristall tunnels where Messerschmitt jet fighter fuselages were built. Gusen II is widely regarded as the worst place in the Mauthausen system. Almost nothing of it is marked today, because a housing estate was built over the site in the 1960s. Notable for a camp deadlier than most main camps, built over by a postwar housing estate. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as granite quarry forced labor; underground aircraft production (Messerschmitt Me 262 fuselages); killing site Did it change over time? Yes in status. USHMM records that Gusen "retained its autonomous status until early 1944," after which "Gusen, Gusen II, and (later) Gusen III were subcamps of Mauthausen." For most of its existence it was effectively a second main camp, not a satellite. Where Then Austria (annexed to Germany) Today Austria Dates Opened May 25, 1940 Closed May 5, 1945 How it ended May 5, 1945. United States Army, 26th Infantry Division and 11th Armored Division USHMM: "US soldiers assigned to the 26th Infantry Division and the 11th Armored Division liberated some 20,000 prisoners in Gusen on May 5, 1945." The toll some 35,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Gusen' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "Over the course of its existence, some 35,000 of a total of over 60,000 registered prisoners were killed in Gusen." Chances of coming out near-nil Subcamps three camps in the Gusen group: Gusen I, II and III Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Gusen Memorial, administered by the Mauthausen Memorial. Most of the site is under private housing. The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "SS authorities established Gusen concentration camp in Austria on May 25, 1940." ... "Over the course of its existence, some 35,000 of a total of over 60,000 registered prisoners were killed in Gusen." ... "In November 1943, the camp authorities deployed prisoners at the Detachment 'Cellar Construction' (Kellerbau), building underground tunnels in the sandstone hills northwest of Gusen." ... "US soldiers assigned to the 26th Infantry Division and the 11th Armored Division liberated some 20,000 prisoners in Gusen on May 5, 1945." Close the recordfor Gusen
Herzogenbusch Vught, Kamp Vught, Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch, 's-Hertogenbosch Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp several hundred USHMMDeported from here about 12,000 Jews were held and all were eventually deported to Sobibor and Auschwitz USHMM Where:Netherlands	concentration camp Concentration camp	NetherlandsGerman-occupied Netherlands	Open the recordfor Herzogenbusch
Herzogenbusch Herzogenbusch was the only full SS concentration camp built in the occupied Netherlands, set up because the German police chief in the Netherlands thought Westerbork was deporting Jews too slowly and Amersfoort was badly run. It held Jews awaiting deportation alongside Dutch resistance members, hostages and Jehovah's Witnesses. Its Jewish section was emptied to Sobibor and Auschwitz in 1943, including the children taken in June 1943 in what the Dutch remember as the children's transport. Notable for the only SS concentration camp in the occupied Netherlands, and the children's transport of June 1943. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as SS concentration camp; transit section for Jews (Judendurchgangslager); forced-labor camp including a Philips workshop; hostage and political prisoner camp; execution site Did it change over time? It contained a Jewish transit section and a concentration camp section at the same time, in the same compound, under one administration. Where Then German-occupied Netherlands Today Netherlands Dates Opened January 13, 1943. Formally established January 5, 1943; began functioning January 13, 1943. Closed September 6, 1944 How it ended October 26, 1944. Allied forces reached the emptied camp on October 26, 1944. The Germans evacuated it September 5 and 6, 1944. The toll several hundred died in the camp; about 12,000 Jews were held and all were eventually deported to Sobibor and Auschwitz Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Herzogenbusch Main Camp (Vught)' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "an estimated 30,000 people were imprisoned" across all camp sections; "About 12,000 people, men, women, and children, were imprisoned in Herzogenbusch, all of whom were eventually deported to Sobibor and Auschwitz." On deaths: "by April 1943 over 200 prisoners had perished"; about 400 died in the first six months; "about 450 political prisoners were shot" in the final two months. Chances of coming out hard in the camp; near-nil for the Jewish prisoners once deported Subcamps several, including a short-lived subcamp at the Amersfoort police transit camp from May to July 1943 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today National Monument Camp Vught (Nationaal Monument Kamp Vught) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "an 'official' concentration camp, in other words, a camp under direct supervision of the Berlin offices of the SS-Business Administration Main Office" ... "an estimated 30,000 people were imprisoned" ... "About 12,000 people, men, women, and children, were imprisoned in Herzogenbusch, all of whom were eventually deported to Sobibor and Auschwitz." Close the recordfor Herzogenbusch
Kauen Kovno Kovno ghetto, Kaunas ghetto, Konzentrationslager Kauen, Slobodka Deaths recorded here: tens of thousands Where:Lithuania	ghetto converted to concentration camp Concentration camp	LithuaniaGerman-occupied Lithuania (Reichskommissariat Ostland)	Open the recordfor Kauen
Kauen Some 30,000 Jews were shut behind wire in the Slobodka district of Kaunas in August 1941. Over the following months the Germans and their Lithuanian auxiliaries marched thousands of them out to the Ninth Fort, a nineteenth-century Tsarist fortification on the edge of the city, and shot them in the ditches. In September 1943 the SS converted what remained into a concentration camp, and in July 1944 they burned it and shipped the survivors to Stutthof and Dachau. Notable for the Ninth Fort, and the ghetto's own secret photographic and documentary record. Classification ghetto converted to concentration camp Also functioned as ghetto; concentration camp from September 1943; forced-labor camp; feeder to the Ninth Fort killing site Did it change over time? Yes, and this is one of the clearest cases of a ghetto becoming a camp. The ghetto was established in July 1941; in September 1943 the SS took it over and turned it into the Kauen concentration camp, with subcamps. Where Then German-occupied Lithuania (Reichskommissariat Ostland) Today Lithuania Dates Opened July 1941 Closed July 1944 How it ended August 1944. Not liberated as a camp. The Germans evacuated it in early July 1944 and burned the ghetto; Soviet forces took Kaunas on August 1, 1944. The toll tens of thousands: of the 30,000 people imprisoned in the ghetto, only around 2,500 survived the war (USHMM); at the Ninth Fort alone, the massacres of September 26, October 4 and October 29, 1941 killed 1,200 to 1,600, about 1,800 and more than 9,200 people Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Kovno' What the institutions actually say USHMM records the Ninth Fort massacres: September 26, 1941, "1,200-1,600 Jews, including many women and children"; October 4, 1941, "Approximately 1,800 people"; and October 28 and 29, 1941, the Great Action, in which over 9,200 Jews were murdered. Of the roughly 6,000 Jews deported from Kovno in 1944, "Most ... later died in these camps." Chances of coming out hard in the ghetto years; near-nil once selected for the Ninth Fort Subcamps several, including Aleksotas and Šančiai Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place The Kovno ghetto is a rare case where the visual record is not dominated by the perpetrators. George Kadish, a Jewish photographer in the ghetto, shot hundreds of clandestine photographs through a buttonhole in his coat and buried the negatives. The ghetto's Jewish council and its artists also kept an extensive secret archive. Kadish took those photographs at the risk of his life, and they are the direct counterweight to the perpetrator photography that dominates most other sites in this directory. A survivor's words The scenes that unfolded before our eyes horrified us to our very core. Rivka Wolbe · Source The site today The Ninth Fort Museum (Kauno IX forto muziejus) and memorials in the former ghetto area The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "On August 15, 1941, some 30,000 of Kovno's Jews were imprisoned behind barbed wire fences." ... "The SS took control of the ghetto and turned it into a concentration camp." ... "In early July 1944, as the frontline approached Kovno, the Germans evacuated the Kauen concentration camp." ... "Most of the approximately 6,000 Jews deported from Kovno later died in these camps." Close the recordfor Kauen
Majdanek Lublin/Majdanek, Konzentrationslager Lublin, KL Lublin Deaths recorded here: approximately 78,000 State Museum at Majdanek, main camp 80,000 to 110,000 USHMM, main camp Figures in conflict Where:Poland	concentration camp Concentration camp Classified differently by Yad Vashem	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District)	Open the recordfor Majdanek
Majdanek Majdanek sat on the edge of the city of Lublin, in plain view of a main road, with no attempt at concealment. It held Soviet prisoners of war, Polish political prisoners and Jews, worked them, and also gassed people. On November 3, 1943 the SS and police shot roughly 18,000 Jews there in a single day as part of Operation Harvest Festival, the largest single-day, single-location massacre of the Holocaust. Because the Red Army arrived faster than the SS expected, the gas chambers and crematorium survived. Notable for the first major camp liberated, with its killing apparatus intact, and the site of the largest one-day massacre of the Holocaust. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as prisoner-of-war camp; forced-labor camp; killing site with gas chambers; storage and sorting depot for property taken from murdered Jews Did it change over time? Yes. Construction began in early October 1941 with the arrival of around 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and the site was first a POW camp under SS control. It became a concentration camp in 1943. Gas chambers were built and used between roughly October 1942 and September 1943. It is one of the two sites, with Auschwitz, where a concentration camp and a place of gassing operated on the same ground. Classified differently USHMM counts five killing centers and does not include Majdanek. Yad Vashem's published list of death camps has six and does. Both institutions are looking at the same ground. This entry follows USHMM's classification and tells you where the other one differs. Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District) Today Poland Dates Opened October 1941 Closed July 1944 How it ended July 23, 1944. Soviet forces (Red Army) USHMM, key dates, July 23 to 24, 1944: "Soviet forces liberate Lublin/Majdanek and find fewer than 500 prisoners left in the camp." Majdanek was the first major camp reached by the Allies and the first whose gas chambers were found substantially intact. The toll approximately 78,000 by the State Museum at Majdanek's own research; USHMM gives 80,000 to 110,000 for the main camp and 95,000 to 130,000 across the whole Majdanek system Figures from State Museum at Majdanek (Tomasz Kranz, 2005) and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Lublin/Majdanek Concentration Camp: Areas of Research' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "The number of deaths is now estimated at between 80,000 and 110,000 for the main camp alone" and "at a minimum, between 95,000 and 130,000 prisoners died in the Majdanek system between November 1941 and January 1945." The museum on the site gives a lower figure for the main camp. The figure has been revised Two earlier figures were in wide circulation: 360,000, from a 1948 publication by the judge Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz, and 235,000, from a 1992 article by Dr. Czeslaw Rajca. In 2005 Tomasz Kranz, head of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek, published a new figure of approximately 78,000, of whom about 59,000 were Jews and about 19,000 were people of other backgrounds, mostly Poles and Belarusians. The finding was reported by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on December 23, 2005, under the headline "Majdanek Victims Enumerated: Changes in the History Textbooks." The figure came down because a Holocaust museum's own research department did the counting again with better records, which is what serious history looks like. The institution's announcement Chances of coming out hard About the photographs of this place The 1944 Soviet liberation footage and photographs were made and distributed as wartime propaganda by the country that had just liberated the site, and the framing is theirs. The postwar Polish memorial and its literature carried the 360,000 figure for decades, so archival images of monuments and signage at Majdanek may show a number that the site's own museum has since abandoned. The site today State Museum at Majdanek (Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku), which also administers the Belzec and Sobibor memorials The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Early October 1941 ... construction on the camp begins in early October with the arrival of around 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war." ... October 1942 to September 1943: "The SS constructs two, possibly three gas chambers at Majdanek." ... "November 3, 1943 ... they concentrate 18,000 Jews from various camps and prisons in Lublin, including at least 8,000 Jewish prisoners in Majdanek, and then shoot them" ... July 23 to 24, 1944: "Soviet forces liberate Lublin/Majdanek and find fewer than 500 prisoners left in the camp." Close the recordfor Majdanek
Mauthausen Konzentrationslager Mauthausen, Mauthausen-Gusen Deaths recorded here: at least 95,000USHMM Where:Austria	concentration camp Concentration camp	AustriaAustria (annexed to Germany, 1938)	Open the recordfor Mauthausen
Mauthausen Mauthausen was built above a granite quarry on the Danube in Upper Austria and graded by the SS as the worst camp in the system. Prisoners carried granite blocks up more than 180 steps out of the Wiener Graben quarry, and the SS used the climb itself as a method of killing. The camp had a gas chamber, and prisoners were also killed by shooting, by being pushed from the quarry edge and by being left outside in winter. Notable for the only camp the SS graded category III, and the quarry stairs. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as quarry forced labor; underground armaments production; killing site (gas chamber, and killings by shooting, exposure and the quarry stairs) Did it change over time? Yes in classification. In January 1941 the SS designated Mauthausen a category III camp, the harshest grade in the system, reserved for prisoners considered irredeemable. From 1943 the emphasis shifted to armaments labor in the subcamps. Where Then Austria (annexed to Germany, 1938) Today Austria Dates Opened August 1938 Closed May 5, 1945 How it ended May 5, 1945. United States Army; a reconnaissance unit reached the camp on May 5, 1945, with the 11th Armored Division arriving in the following days The toll at least 95,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Mauthausen' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "An estimated 197,464 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945. At least 95,000 died there. More than 14,000 were Jewish." Stated as a floor. Chances of coming out near-nil for prisoners assigned to the quarry detail; hard overall Subcamps nearly 50 (USHMM); the Mauthausen Memorial lists 47 subcamps across Austria and states over 40 had been set up by liberation Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place The most widely circulated wartime photographs of Mauthausen come from SS albums, including images of Heinrich Himmler's 1941 inspection tour. They show the camp as its administrators wanted it recorded, with the quarry as an industrial achievement rather than a killing method. A significant counterweight exists: the Spanish Republican prisoner Francisco Boix worked in the camp's photographic service and smuggled out SS negatives that were later used in evidence at Nuremberg. The site today Mauthausen Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "An estimated 197,464 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945. At least 95,000 died there. More than 14,000 were Jewish." ... "Between 1940 and 1945, the SS authorities established nearly 50 subcamps in the Mauthausen concentration camp system." ... prisoners were "forced to carry these granite blocks up more than 180 steps" ... "Members of an US Army arrived at the camp and secured the surrounding area on May 5." Close the recordfor Mauthausen
Mittelbau-Dora Dora-Mittelbau, Dora-Nordhausen, Nordhausen, Mittelbau Deaths recorded here: at least 20,000 across the Mittelbau systemMittelbau-Dora Memorial Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Thuringia)	Open the recordfor Mittelbau-Dora
Mittelbau-Dora Mittelbau-Dora is where the V-2 rocket was built. After the RAF bombed Peenemünde in August 1943, production moved into tunnels dug through a gypsum ridge in the Harz mountains, and the digging was done by concentration camp prisoners who for months were not allowed out of the tunnels at all. They slept underground in the dust and the noise. More people died making the V-2 than were killed by it. Notable for the underground V-2 rocket factory, and the fact that the weapon killed more of its builders than its targets. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as underground armaments production; V-2 rocket assembly; tunnel construction Did it change over time? Yes. Prisoners were sent from Buchenwald in 1943 to dig the tunnels, and the site was a Buchenwald subcamp until October 1944, when the SS made it an independent concentration camp with more than thirty subcamps of its own. Where Then Germany (Thuringia) Today Germany Dates Opened August 1943. USHMM: "Prisoners from Buchenwald were sent to the area in 1943"; the camp became independent in October 1944. Closed April 11, 1945 How it ended April 11, 1945. United States Army USHMM: "When American forces liberated Dora-Mittelbau in April 1945, only a few prisoners were still in the camp." The USHMM timeline gives April 11, 1945. Nearly all prisoners had been evacuated, including on the transport that ended in the Gardelegen barn massacre of April 13, 1945. The toll at least 20,000 across the Mittelbau system (memorial figure; USHMM's overview article gives no total) Figures from Mittelbau-Dora Memorial (Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation). USHMM's overview does not publish a total. What the institutions actually say USHMM's overview states only that "more than 200 were publicly hanged for sabotaging production" and that "thousands were killed during death marches," and gives no aggregate. The commonly cited figure of at least 20,000 dead comes from the memorial, not from USHMM. Chances of coming out near-nil in the first phase underground; hard afterwardUSHMM: "Until the spring of 1944, prisoners were kept mostly underground, deprived of daylight and fresh air, and enclosed in unstable tunnels. The mortality rate was higher than at most other concentration camps." Subcamps more than 30 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place Postwar American photography of the Mittelwerk tunnels was made in the course of a technology-recovery operation that also brought Wernher von Braun and his colleagues to the United States. Images of US officers inspecting the underground factory are documents of that transfer as much as of the camp. The site today Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "In October 1944, the SS made Dora-Mittelbau an independent concentration camp with more than 30 subcamps of its own." ... "Until the spring of 1944, prisoners were kept mostly underground, deprived of daylight and fresh air, and enclosed in unstable tunnels. The mortality rate was higher than at most other concentration camps." ... "When American forces liberated Dora-Mittelbau in April 1945, only a few prisoners were still in the camp." Close the recordfor Mittelbau-Dora
Natzweiler-Struthof Natzweiler, Le Struthof, Konzentrationslager Natzweiler Deaths recorded here: between 19,000 and 20,000 USHMM, whole camp system, 1941 to 1945 around 17,000 Struthof memorial, about 3,000 of them in the main camp Figures in conflict Where:France	concentration camp Concentration camp	FranceGerman-annexed Alsace	Open the recordfor Natzweiler-Struthof
Natzweiler-Struthof Natzweiler was cut into a mountainside in the Vosges, terraced barracks stepping down a slope above a quarry of red granite that Albert Speer wanted for Nazi building projects. It is the only concentration camp the SS built on French soil. From 1943 it held Nacht und Nebel prisoners, resistance members seized in western Europe and made to vanish. In August 1943 the SS built a gas chamber here and killed more than eighty Jewish prisoners so that the Strasbourg anatomist August Hirt could assemble a collection of Jewish skeletons. Notable for the only SS concentration camp on French soil, the Night and Fog prisoners, and the Hirt skeleton collection. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as granite quarry forced labor; detention of Night and Fog (Nacht und Nebel) prisoners; site of gassings for anatomical collection and of experiments Did it change over time? Yes in emphasis. It opened in May 1941 as a quarry camp and from summer 1943 became a principal holding site for Night and Fog prisoners, resistance members from western Europe who were to disappear without trace. Where Then German-annexed Alsace Today France Dates Opened May 1941 Closed September 1944. The main camp was evacuated to Dachau in August and September 1944; the subcamps east of the Rhine ran until April 1945. How it ended November 1944. United States forces reached the empty main camp in late November 1944, the first concentration camp in western Europe entered by the Western Allies. Its prisoners had already been moved to Dachau. USHMM's article does not name the liberating unit for the main camp; it notes that prisoners evacuated to Dachau were liberated by US troops in April 1945. The toll between 19,000 and 20,000 across the whole camp system, 1941 to 1945 (USHMM); the memorial counts around 17,000, about 3,000 of them in the main camp Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Natzweiler-Struthof'; the Struthof memorial What the institutions actually say USHMM: "From May 1941 to March 1945, between 19,000 and 20,000 people died in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system." The figure covers the whole system, not the small main camp alone. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps about 50 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Centre européen du résistant déporté and the Struthof memorial site The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "one of the smaller concentration camps built by the Germans" ... "From May 1941 to March 1945, between 19,000 and 20,000 people died in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system." ... "There were about 50 subcamps in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system" ... "Beginning in the summer of 1943, the Germans detained many 'Night and Fog' prisoners in Natzweiler-Struthof" ... "In August 1943, a gas chamber was constructed ... The bodies of more than 80 Jewish prisoners gassed at Natzweiler-Struthof were sent to the Strasbourg University Institute of Anatomy. There, anatomist Dr. August Hirt amassed a large collection of Jewish skeletons." Close the recordfor Natzweiler-Struthof
Neuengamme Konzentrationslager Neuengamme Deaths recorded here: more than 50,000 USHMM at least 42,900 Neuengamme Memorial, including deaths on the evacuation marches and the bombed prisoner ships Figures in conflict Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Hamburg)	Open the recordfor Neuengamme
Neuengamme Neuengamme was built beside a brickworks on a canal outside Hamburg and grew into the main camp for northern Germany, with roughly eighty subcamps clearing bomb rubble and making weapons. Two events at its end are widely known. In April 1945 the SS murdered twenty Jewish children, brought from Auschwitz for tuberculosis experiments, along with their four Jewish caregivers, in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg. And on May 3, 1945 British aircraft attacked ships in Lübeck Bay carrying evacuated prisoners; the Cap Arcona, with more than 4,500 prisoners aboard, burned and capsized. Notable for the Bullenhuser Damm children, and the Cap Arcona sinking days before the German surrender. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as brickworks and construction forced labor; armaments production across some 80 subcamps; site of medical experiments on children Did it change over time? Yes. It began in December 1938 as a subcamp of Sachsenhausen attached to a brickworks and became an independent main camp with a large subcamp network across northern and central Germany from 1942. Where Then Germany (Hamburg) Today Germany Dates Opened December 1938 Closed April 30, 1945 How it ended May 4, 1945. British forces reached the emptied camp on May 4, 1945. The SS had evacuated the main camp from April 19 and completed the evacuation on April 30. The toll more than 50,000 (USHMM); the memorial's own count is at least 42,900, including deaths on the evacuation marches and the bombed prisoner ships Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Neuengamme'; Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial What the institutions actually say USHMM: "In all, more than 50,000 prisoners, almost half of all those imprisoned in the camp during its existence, died in Neuengamme concentration camp." A separate figure: "The death register at Neuengamme indicates that about 40,000 prisoners died in the camp by April 10, 1945." The gap between USHMM's two figures is largely the evacuation. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps approximately 80 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "In all, more than 50,000 prisoners, almost half of all those imprisoned in the camp during its existence, died in Neuengamme concentration camp." ... "approximately 80 subcamps at various locations in northern and central Germany between 1942 and 1945" ... "The Cap Arcona, carrying more than 4,500 prisoners, burned and capsized during the attack. Only about 600 prisoners from both ships survived." ... "In April 1945 ... the SS murdered these children along with their four Jewish caregivers at the Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg." ... "British forces arrived on May 4, 1945." Close the recordfor Neuengamme
Ravensbrück Ravensbrueck, Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück Deaths recorded here: an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 of the women held thereUSHMM Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Brandenburg)	Open the recordfor Ravensbrück
Ravensbrück Ravensbrück was the SS's camp for women, built on a lake north of Berlin, and it was also where the SS trained the women who guarded female prisoners across the whole system. Prisoners sewed uniforms and later assembled electrical components for Siemens. Doctors carried out experiments here, deliberately infecting wounds to test sulfonamide drugs, transplanting and amputating bone, and sterilizing women and children, many of them Roma. Notable for the main Nazi concentration camp for women, and the training school for female SS guards. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as concentration camp for women; forced-labor camp; site of medical experiments including sterilization and deliberate wounding; training site for female SS guards; killing site after a gas chamber was installed in early 1945 Did it change over time? Yes. A men's camp was added in April 1941 and a camp for adolescent girls, the Uckermark youth camp, in June 1942. In early 1945 the SS installed a gas chamber beside the crematorium and killed between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners in the last months. Where Then Germany (Brandenburg) Today Germany Dates Opened May 1939. Construction began November 1938; the camp received its first prisoners in May 1939. Closed April 30, 1945 How it ended April 30, 1945. Soviet forces (Red Army) Ravensbrück Memorial: "On 30 April 1945, the Red Army liberated the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where around 2,000 sick and weakened prisoners had been left behind." The toll an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 of the women held there (USHMM); the memorial says tens of thousands and gives no single figure Figures from Ravensbrück Memorial (Brandenburg Memorials Foundation) and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum What the institutions actually say The memorial gives a total prisoner population of "approximately 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,200 adolescent girls" and states tens of thousands were murdered or died, without a single aggregate figure. Documented components include around 1,900 killed under the 14f13 program and "approximately 5,000 to 6,000" gassed between January and April 1945. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps over 40 (USHMM), holding over 70,000 predominantly female prisoners Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Ravensbrück Memorial, part of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM: "The largest concentration camp for women within Germany's prewar borders." ... "Over 40 subcamps with over 70,000 predominantly female prisoners." ... "In early 1945, the SS constructed a gas chamber in Ravensbrück near the camp crematorium." ... "between 5,000 and 6,000 prisoners" gassed before liberation. Memorial: "approximately 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,200 adolescent girls" ... "On 30 April 1945, the Red Army liberated the Ravensbrück concentration camp." Close the recordfor Ravensbrück
Riga-Kaiserwald Kaiserwald, Mežaparks, Konzentrationslager Riga-Kaiserwald Deaths recorded here: Not establishedNo reliable total for the camp itself. Where:Latvia	concentration camp Concentration camp	LatviaGerman-occupied Latvia (Reichskommissariat Ostland)	Open the recordfor Riga-Kaiserwald
Riga-Kaiserwald Kaiserwald was built in a wooded suburb of Riga in March 1943 and absorbed the survivors of the Riga ghetto when it was liquidated that summer, along with Jews deported from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. It was a labor camp feeding Latvian industry. In 1944 the SS killed those unfit to work and shipped the rest to Stutthof by sea. Notable for the concentration camp that absorbed the Riga ghetto, and the Baltic evacuation route to Stutthof. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp; destination for the liquidated Riga ghetto and for Jews deported from Germany and Central Europe Where Then German-occupied Latvia (Reichskommissariat Ostland) Today Latvia Dates Opened March 1943 Closed 1944 How it ended October 1944. Not liberated. The camp was evacuated to Stutthof in summer and autumn 1944; Soviet forces took Riga on October 13, 1944. The toll no reliable total for the camp itself; at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot at Rumbula on November 30 and December 8 and 9, 1941, before the camp existed Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Riga' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "On November 30 and December 8-9, at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot by German SS and police units and their Latvian auxiliaries in the nearby Rumbula Forest." That figure belongs to Rumbula and the ghetto, not to Kaiserwald. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps numerous work camps around Riga, including Spilve and the Lenta workshops Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. A survivor's words when the people got there they were told to undress, put the shoe in one pile, the shoes in one pile, clothing in another pile, driven to the edges of these mass graves, and machine-gunned Steven Springfield · Source The site today The Rumbula memorial and the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum address this history; the Kaiserwald site itself is largely unmarked. The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "On November 30 and December 8-9, at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot by German SS and police units and their Latvian auxiliaries in the nearby Rumbula Forest." Kaiserwald "had been established in March in the north of the city." Close the recordfor Riga-Kaiserwald
Sachsenhausen Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen Deaths recorded here: an estimated 30,000 to 50,000USHMM, based on recent research Where:Germany	concentration camp Concentration camp	GermanyGermany (Brandenburg)	Open the recordfor Sachsenhausen
Sachsenhausen Sachsenhausen was built in 1936 as the SS's idea of a perfect camp, a triangle of barracks fanning out from a single gate tower so that one machine gun could cover the whole roll-call square. The Inspectorate of Concentration Camps moved its headquarters next door in 1938, which made this the administrative center of the entire system. Prisoners were worked in a brickworks, in SS workshops, and in a counterfeiting operation that forged British banknotes. Notable for the SS's architectural model camp and the headquarters of the concentration camp system. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp; administrative headquarters of the concentration camp system from 1938; SS counterfeiting operation (Operation Bernhard); execution site for Soviet prisoners of war Did it change over time? Yes in population. USHMM: "In the early stage of the camp's existence the SS and police incarcerated mainly political opponents and real or perceived criminal offenders in Sachsenhausen ... Between 1936 and 1945, however, Sachsenhausen also held Jews, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, 'asocials' ... and, later, Soviet civilians." Where Then Germany (Brandenburg) Today Germany Dates Opened July 12, 1936 Closed April 22, 1945 How it ended April 22, 1945. Soviet and Polish army units Sachsenhausen Memorial: "On 22 April 1945, units of the Soviet and Polish armies finally liberated around 3,000 sick internees as well as nurses and doctors who had been left behind in the camp." More than 30,000 others had been marched out beginning April 21. The toll an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 (USHMM, based on recent research); USHMM separately estimates that 11,000 to 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war were killed there Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum What the institutions actually say USHMM: "Estimates of Soviet POWs killed at Sachsenhausen range from 11,000-18,000." The memorial states more than 200,000 people were interned between 1936 and 1945 and that tens of thousands died, without publishing one aggregate number. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps more than 100 subcamps and external work detachments (memorial figure, not yet confirmed in a single institutional statement) Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, part of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The SS established the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as the principal concentration camp for the Berlin area." Opened "July 12, 1936." ... "Estimates of Soviet POWs killed at Sachsenhausen range from 11,000-18,000." ... "Prominent figures interned in Sachsenhausen included Pastor Martin Niemöller, former Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, Georg Elser, Herschel Grynszpan, and Joseph Stalin's son, Yakov Dzhugashvili." Memorial: "More than 200,000 people were interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945." Close the recordfor Sachsenhausen
Stutthof Sztutowo, Konzentrationslager Stutthof Deaths recorded here: more than 60,000USHMM Where:Poland	concentration camp Concentration camp	PolandFree City of Danzig, then German-annexed territory (Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia)	Open the recordfor Stutthof
Stutthof Stutthof was set up in a marshy strip of forest east of Danzig on the day the war began, and it was the first camp the Germans established outside their 1937 borders and the last one liberated. It was first a camp for Polish civilians from Danzig and Pomerania, and from 1944 it took in tens of thousands of Jewish women deported from the Baltic ghettos and from Auschwitz. In the evacuation, about 5,000 prisoners from the subcamps were marched to the Baltic shore, forced into the water and machine-gunned. Notable for the first camp established outside Germany's prewar borders and the last major camp liberated. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as civilian internment camp; labor education camp; forced-labor camp; killing site after a gas chamber was put into use in June 1944 Did it change over time? Yes, three times, and USHMM states the sequence plainly: "Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief. In November 1941, it became a 'labor education' camp, administered by the German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp." Gassing with Zyklon B began in June 1944. Where Then Free City of Danzig, then German-annexed territory (Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia) Today Poland Dates Opened September 2, 1939. USHMM gives September 1939. The camp received its first prisoners in the first days of the war. Closed May 9, 1945 How it ended May 9, 1945. Soviet forces (Red Army) USHMM: "Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945." This is one day after the German surrender took effect and makes Stutthof the last major camp liberated. The toll more than 60,000 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Stutthof' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "More than 60,000 people died in the camp." Separately: "It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps." Chances of coming out hard; near-nil for those on the January 1945 marches and the Baltic evacuations Subcamps 105 Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Stutthof Museum in Sztutowo The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief. In November 1941, it became a 'labor education' camp, administered by the German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp." ... "More than 60,000 people died in the camp." ... "105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland" ... "Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in June 1944" ... "About 5,000 prisoners from Stutthof subcamps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine gunned" ... "Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945." Close the recordfor Stutthof
Vaivara Konzentrationslager Vaivara, Vaivara camp system Deaths recorded here: thousands Where:Estonia	concentration camp Concentration camp	EstoniaGerman-occupied Estonia (Reichskommissariat Ostland)	Open the recordfor Vaivara
Vaivara Vaivara was the SS administrative center for around twenty labor camps scattered across northeastern Estonia, where Jews deported from the Vilna and Kovno ghettos and from Latvia mined oil shale and built defensive works. Estonia is the northern edge of the Holocaust and its camps are among the least known in the whole system. Notable for the northernmost concentration camp system, and the Klooga killings found intact by Soviet troops. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp for oil shale mining and military construction; administrative center for around twenty camps in Estonia Where Then German-occupied Estonia (Reichskommissariat Ostland) Today Estonia Dates Opened August 1943 Closed September 1944 How it ended September 1944. Not liberated as an operating camp. Soviet forces reached the Estonian camps in September 1944 and found the dead at Klooga. The toll thousands; no verified total. At Klooga alone, SS men shot between about 1,800 and 2,500 prisoners on September 19, 1944 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Estonia' (partial) What the institutions actually say USHMM's Estonia article confirms the camp system and the Klooga killings but gives no aggregate death toll. Chances of coming out near-nil Subcamps around twenty camps across Estonia, including Klooga, Lagedi, Ereda and Kiviõli Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place The Klooga photographs are among the most graphic images in the entire Holocaust record. When Soviet troops arrived in September 1944, the Germans had shot the prisoners and stacked the bodies on pyres of logs but had not had time to burn them, and Soviet photographers recorded the pyres exactly as found. These images depict the dead in large numbers and were made and circulated as Soviet wartime evidence and propaganda. The site today Memorials at Klooga and Vaivara; the Estonian History Museum addresses the sites. How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Starting in 1942, tens of thousands of Jews from other European countries were sent to forced-labor camps inside Estonia. The main camp was Vaivara." ... "Jewish forced laborers built military defenses for the German army and mined shale oil." ... "Corpses of inmates from the Klooga camp stacked for burning. Soviet troops discovered the bodies when they liberated the camp." Close the recordfor Vaivara
Warsaw concentration camp KL Warschau, Gęsiówka, Gesiowka Deaths recorded here: Not establishedThe Institute of National Remembrance says the number of victims cannot be determined precisely. Where:Poland	concentration camp Concentration camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Warsaw District)	Open the recordfor Warsaw concentration camp
Warsaw concentration camp After the Warsaw ghetto uprising was crushed and the ghetto burned, the Germans built a concentration camp in the ruins and brought in prisoners, many of them Jews from Greece and Hungary, to pull down what was left and sort the bricks for reuse. On August 5, 1944, in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising, Polish Home Army soldiers broke into the camp and freed several hundred Jewish prisoners, many of whom then fought in the uprising. Notable for a concentration camp built inside the ruins of the ghetto it had helped destroy, and the Home Army's liberation of its prisoners. Classification concentration camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp clearing the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto; salvage operation recovering brick and metal from the destroyed ghetto Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Warsaw District) Today Poland Dates Opened July 1943 Closed August 1944 How it ended August 5, 1944. Polish Home Army soldiers freed the surviving prisoners on August 5, 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising. The toll no verified total; the Institute of National Remembrance says the number of victims cannot be determined precisely Figures from Not established. A caution about the numbers Claims of greatly inflated death tolls at KL Warschau circulated in Poland in the 2000s and were examined and rejected by the Institute of National Remembrance. Chances of coming out hard The site today The Museum of Pawiak Prison and the Warsaw Uprising Museum address the site; a memorial marks Gęsia Street. How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Close the recordfor Warsaw concentration camp

Forced-labor camps 14 of 61

Built around a job. People were worked until they could not work, and then killed or sent away to die.

How you tell: ask whether the site was built around a job, such as a quarry, a plant, a rail line or a canal; if moving the work would leave the camp with no reason to exist, it was a forced-labor camp.

Forced-labor camps. 14 of the 61 camps in this directory. Each row gives the camp, the deaths recorded there with the institution that published the figure, the kind of site it was, and where it is today. Open a record for the full entry.
Camp	What kind of site it was	Where it is today	The full record
Alderney Lager Sylt, Lager Norderney, Lager Borkum, Lager Helgoland, Alderney camps Deaths recorded here: likely between 641 and 1,027 2024 UK government expert review 389 Official estimate made after liberation in 1945 Figures in conflict Where:Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown dependency	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown dependencyGerman-occupied Channel Islands	Open the recordfor Alderney
Alderney Alderney is the northernmost Channel Island, British territory, and the Germans occupied it and built four labor camps there to fortify it as part of the Atlantic Wall. Prisoners came from Ukraine, Poland, Russia and the Soviet territories, and a significant group of French Jews was held at Lager Norderney. In March 1943 the SS took over Lager Sylt and ran it as a subcamp of Neuengamme, which makes it the only SS concentration camp on British soil. Notable for the only Nazi concentration camp on British soil, and a death toll revised upward in 2024. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camps for Atlantic Wall construction; SS concentration camp (Lager Sylt from March 1943, as a subcamp of Neuengamme); camp holding French Jews (Lager Norderney) Did it change over time? Yes. Four Organisation Todt labor camps were built from 1942. In March 1943 Lager Sylt passed to the SS as a subcamp of Neuengamme, making it the only SS concentration camp on British soil. Where Then German-occupied Channel Islands Today Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown dependency Dates Opened 1942 Closed June 1944. Lager Sylt was closed and the SS withdrew in June 1944; the German garrison on Alderney surrendered on May 16, 1945. How it ended May 16, 1945. British forces accepted the German surrender of Alderney on May 16, 1945. The toll likely between 641 and 1,027 (2024 UK government expert review); the official estimate made after liberation in 1945 was 389 Figures from The 2024 review commissioned by the UK government and reported by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and multiple outlets The figure has been revised The official estimate made after liberation in 1945 put the deaths on Alderney at 389. A UK government expert review published in 2024 raised the estimate to a likely range of 641 to 1,027. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps four camps: Borkum, Helgoland, Norderney and Sylt Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place Alderney's history was contested and under-investigated in Britain for eighty years, and the imagery that exists is sparse and often from postwar British investigation files. Recent archaeological survey has produced new material. The site today The remains of Lager Sylt are a protected site; a memorial marks it. Alderney has no museum dedicated to the camps. The memorial's website How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Close the recordfor Alderney
Blechhammer Blachownia Śląska, Sławięcice Deaths recorded here: approximately 250 USHMM, in the camp almost 200 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in the camp Figures in conflict Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandUpper Silesia	Open the recordfor Blechhammer
Blechhammer Blechhammer was the second-largest Auschwitz subcamp after Monowitz, attached to a synthetic fuels plant. Because the Americans bombed the plant from June 1944, prisoners were also sent out to find and defuse unexploded bombs. On January 21, 1945 about 4,000 prisoners were marched out toward Gross-Rosen; roughly 800 were shot on the way over ten to thirteen days. Notable for the second-largest Auschwitz subcamp, and a documented January 1945 death march. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as Schmelt Organization forced-labor camp for Jews; subcamp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz from April 1944; synthetic fuel plant labor Did it change over time? Yes. USHMM: the Germans created the subcamp on "April 1, 1944, when they placed the Jewish forced-labor camp near Blechhammer (now Blachownia Slaska) under the command of the Auschwitz III-Monowitz concentration camp." Before that it was a Schmelt Organization camp, a separate system of Jewish forced labor in Silesia that predated and operated outside the concentration camp administration. Where Then Upper Silesia Today Poland Dates Opened April 1, 1944. As an Auschwitz subcamp. The Schmelt camp on the site dates from 1942. Closed January 21, 1945 How it ended January 1945. Soviet forces reached the site after the SS burned and shelled the barracks with sick prisoners left inside; some survived. The toll approximately 200 to 250 died in the camp; approximately 800 more were shot on the January 1945 evacuation march Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum What the institutions actually say USHMM: "Approximately 250 prisoners died in the camp over the nine and a half months it existed." The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: "A total of almost 200 prisoners died in the camp, and several hundred more were probably sent to Birkenau after selection." Both institutions agree that about 800 were shot during the evacuation march to Gross-Rosen. Chances of coming out hard in the camp; near-nil on the evacuation march The site today The site is marked; there is no museum. The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM: "April 1, 1944, when they placed the Jewish forced-labor camp near Blechhammer (now Blachownia Slaska) under the command of the Auschwitz III-Monowitz concentration camp." ... "A total of approximately 4,500 male and female prisoners from 15 European countries went through the subcamp." ... "Approximately 250 prisoners died in the camp over the nine and a half months it existed." ... "The Germans began evacuating the prisoners on January 21, 1945 ... Prisoners estimate that approximately 800 people were killed on the way." Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: "The peak population, in January 1945, was almost 4,000 men and 160 women." ... "Shortly before the liberation of Blechhammer by Soviet soldiers, the SS torched, shelled, and tossed grenades into the camp barracks, in which sick prisoners had been left behind." Close the recordfor Blechhammer
Ebensee Zement, Ebensee subcamp of Mauthausen Deaths recorded here: more than 8,100Mauthausen Memorial Where:Austria	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	AustriaAustria (annexed to Germany)	Open the recordfor Ebensee
Ebensee Ebensee sat in an alpine valley in the Salzkammergut, and its prisoners dug tunnels through the mountain for a project codenamed Zement, intended to move rocket and refinery production underground away from Allied bombers. The work was done at a pace calculated to use people up. When American forces arrived in early May 1945 they found survivors in a condition comparable to Belsen. Notable for the alpine tunnel project and the condition of the survivors at liberation. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as subcamp of Mauthausen; tunnel construction for underground armaments production Where Then Austria (annexed to Germany) Today Austria Dates Opened November 1943. Construction began in November 1943 and the camp began functioning as a subcamp in March 1944. The March 1944 date has not been confirmed against the Mauthausen Memorial. Closed May 6, 1945 How it ended May 6, 1945. United States Army; a unit of the 80th Infantry Division reached the camp in early May 1945 USHMM states only that "US forces under the command of General Omar Bradley reached the Ebensee forced-labor camp in Austria in early May 1945." The commonly cited date of May 6, 1945 and the attribution to the 80th Infantry Division have not been confirmed on a USHMM page. The toll more than 8,100 (Mauthausen Memorial) Figures from Mauthausen Memorial; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (qualitative only) What the institutions actually say USHMM states "Thousands died from the harsh conditions and back-breaking labor" without a figure. Chances of coming out near-nil About the photographs of this place The American liberation footage and photographs from Ebensee are among the most graphic in the US Army record and include images of the dead and of extremely emaciated living people. The site today Ebensee Concentration Camp Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee), with a preserved tunnel section The memorial's website How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Germans had built Ebensee at the foot of the Austrian Alps as part of the Mauthausen system of camps." ... "The Nazis employed Ebensee prisoners as forced laborers during the construction of an underground rocket factory." ... "Thousands died from the harsh conditions and back-breaking labor." ... "US forces under the command of General Omar Bradley reached the Ebensee forced-labor camp in Austria in early May 1945." Close the recordfor Ebensee
HASAG Częstochowa Czestochowa, Częstochowa-Warta, HASAG Apparatebau, Częstochowa forced-labor camps Deaths recorded here: Not establishedNo verified total. Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Radom District)	Open the recordfor HASAG Częstochowa
HASAG Częstochowa The HASAG camps at Częstochowa held Jewish forced laborers from the Częstochowa ghetto and later prisoners evacuated from Skarżysko-Kamienna. Because the Red Army reached Częstochowa in January 1945 faster than the Germans expected, several thousand Jewish prisoners were still alive there, which makes it one of the few places in occupied Poland where a substantial Jewish forced-labor population survived to liberation. Notable for one of the few forced-labor camps in Poland where a large Jewish workforce survived to liberation. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camps for Jews attached to HASAG munitions plants; successor holding site for prisoners evacuated from Skarżysko-Kamienna Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Radom District) Today Poland Dates Opened 1942 Closed January 1945 How it ended January 1945. Soviet forces The toll no verified total Figures from Not established. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps several works around Częstochowa Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Memorials in Częstochowa mark the ghetto and camp sites. How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM's Nazi Camps article establishes the category of "labor camps specifically for Jews" administered outside the standardized concentration camp system. Close the recordfor HASAG Częstochowa
Janowska Janowska Street camp, Zwangsarbeitslager Lemberg-Janowska, Lviv-Janowska Deaths recorded here: at least 6,000 were murdered when the camp was liquidated in November 1943 (USHMM); in all, tens of thousands of Jews from Lvov and Eastern Galicia were murdered there (Yad Vashem) Where:Ukraine	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	UkraineGerman-occupied Poland (District Galicia, General Government)	Open the recordfor Janowska
Janowska Janowska sat on the edge of Lviv beside a factory the Germans took over, and it worked as three things at once: a labor camp, a holding pen for Jews being shipped to Belzec, and a place of shooting. It was also the base for Sonderkommando 1005, the unit forced to dig up and burn the bodies of people already murdered across Galicia in order to destroy the evidence. On November 19, 1943 those prisoners rose and tried to escape. A few got away and most were caught and killed. Notable for the Sonderkommando 1005 evidence-destruction unit and the November 19, 1943 revolt. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp for Jews; transit camp during the 1942 deportations to Belzec; killing site by shooting; base for Sonderkommando 1005, the unit that exhumed and burned bodies Did it change over time? USHMM: it was a forced-labor camp that "also served as a transit camp during the mass deportations of Polish Jews to the killing centers in 1942." Where Then German-occupied Poland (District Galicia, General Government) Today Ukraine Dates Opened October 1941. USHMM: the factory operation was established in September 1941 and the adjacent camp in October 1941. Closed November 1943 How it ended Not liberated. The camp was liquidated in November 1943 and Soviet forces reached Lviv in July 1944. The toll at least 6,000 were murdered when the camp was liquidated in November 1943 (USHMM); in all, tens of thousands of Jews from Lvov and Eastern Galicia were murdered there (Yad Vashem) Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Janowska'; Yad Vashem What the institutions actually say USHMM: "The SS staff and their local auxiliaries murdered at least 6,000 surviving Jews from various forced-labor camps in Galicia when the Janowska camp was liquidated in November 1943." USHMM does not give a total for the camp's whole existence. Chances of coming out near-nil About the photographs of this place The best-known photographs associated with Janowska are perpetrator or forensic images, including a photograph of the bone-crushing machine used by Sonderkommando 1005 to grind the remains of burned bodies. That image is documentary evidence of the highest importance and it is also a picture of the industrial processing of human remains. The camp orchestra photographs, showing prisoners made to play as work columns marched out, were likewise made by or for the camp administration. The site today No museum. The site is occupied by a working prison; a memorial stone marks the sands where victims were shot. How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Janowska was a forced-labor camp for Jews in German-occupied Poland. It also served as a transit camp during the mass deportations of Polish Jews to the killing centers in 1942." ... "The SS staff and their local auxiliaries murdered at least 6,000 surviving Jews from various forced-labor camps in Galicia when the Janowska camp was liquidated in November 1943." ... "On November 19, 1943, these prisoners staged an uprising and a mass escape attempt. A few succeeded in escaping, but most were recaptured and killed." ... "Prisoners in the Janowska concentration camp orchestra, which performed as workers were taken to and from forced labor." Close the recordfor Janowska
Kaufering Kaufering camp complex, Landsberg-Kaufering, Ringeltaube Deaths recorded here: thousands Where:Germany	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	GermanyGermany (Bavaria)	Open the recordfor Kaufering
Kaufering Kaufering was eleven camps in the Bavarian countryside near Landsberg, built in 1944 to house prisoners digging enormous concrete bunkers where Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters were to be assembled out of reach of Allied bombers. Most of the prisoners were Jews, many of them Hungarian and Lithuanian, and the camps were partly underground earth huts. This is where the Dachau system's Jewish population mostly was in the last year of the war, not at Dachau itself. Notable for the largest concentration of Jewish prisoners in the Dachau system, building jet fighter bunkers. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as network of eleven subcamps of Dachau; construction of underground bunkers for jet aircraft production Where Then Germany (Bavaria) Today Germany Dates Opened June 1944 Closed April 1945 How it ended April 27, 1945. United States Army, 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 and 101st Airborne Division on April 28, 1945 The toll thousands; USHMM gives no total Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Kaufering' What the institutions actually say USHMM records that liberating soldiers "discovered some 500 dead inmates" at Kaufering IV alone and that hundreds more died when "the SS set fire to the barracks." No total is given. Chances of coming out near-nil Subcamps eleven camps in the complex Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Europäische Holocaustgedenkstätte at Kaufering VII, and the Landsberg memorial initiatives How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "a network of subsidiary camps of the Dachau concentration camp" ... The complex contained "11 camps," with the larger ones "each contained several thousand prisoners." ... prisoners built "subterranean facilities for fighter aircraft production," specifically "the Messerschmitt 262 (ME-262) jet-fighter or V-2 rockets." ... liberating soldiers "discovered some 500 dead inmates" at Kaufering IV. Close the recordfor Kaufering
Klooga Klooga camp, Klooga subcamp of Vaivara Deaths recorded here: approximately 2,000 killed in September 1944 Where:Estonia	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	EstoniaGerman-occupied Estonia	Open the recordfor Klooga
Klooga Klooga held Jews from the Vilna ghetto at forced labor making concrete and cutting timber. In September 1944, with Soviet forces days away, the Germans shot the prisoners and piled the bodies on log pyres to burn them, and then ran out of time. A small number of prisoners hid and survived to describe what happened. Notable for the killing the Germans did not have time to conceal. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp, subcamp of Vaivara; killing site in September 1944 Where Then German-occupied Estonia Today Estonia Dates Opened September 1943 Closed September 19, 1944 How it ended September 1944. Soviet forces reached the site days after the killings. The toll approximately 2,000 killed in September 1944 What the institutions actually say USHMM's caption text states that "Nazi guards and Estonian collaborators had executed the prisoners and then stacked the bodies for burning" and that "Soviet troops discovered the bodies when they liberated the camp," without a number. Chances of coming out near-nil About the photographs of this place The Klooga liberation photographs show unburned pyres of bodies and are among the most graphic in the record. Soviet photographers recorded the pyres exactly as found, and the images were made and circulated as Soviet wartime evidence and propaganda. The site today Klooga Holocaust memorial How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "At the Klooga concentration camp, Soviet soldiers examine the bodies..." and "Corpses of inmates from Klooga concentration camp stacked for burning." Close the recordfor Klooga
Melk Melk subcamp of Mauthausen, Quarz Deaths recorded here: 4,896 died in the campMelk Memorial Where:Austria	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	AustriaAustria (annexed to Germany)	Open the recordfor Melk
Melk Melk was a former artillery barracks below the great baroque abbey on the Danube. Its prisoners dug tunnels at Roggendorf for the Steyr-Daimler-Puch works. Project Witness holds testimony covering Melk tunnel labor, which is unusual, since the subcamps are where most concentration camp prisoners actually were by 1944 and are the least documented part of the system online. Notable for one of the largest Mauthausen subcamps, and an example of how the system's center of gravity moved to the subcamps. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as subcamp of Mauthausen; tunnel construction for underground armaments production Where Then Austria (annexed to Germany) Today Austria Dates Opened April 1944 Closed April 1945 How it ended Not liberated in place; prisoners were evacuated to Ebensee and Mauthausen in April 1945. The toll 4,896 died in the camp, by the Melk Memorial's count; several hundred more died at Ebensee and Mauthausen after the evacuation Figures from Melk Memorial What the institutions actually say The Mauthausen Memorial's subcamp page "provides no death statistics for individual subcamps." Chances of coming out near-nil The site today Melk Memorial (KZ-Gedenkstätte Melk), administered by the Mauthausen Memorial The memorial's website How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text The Mauthausen Memorial identifies 47 subcamps across Austria, including "Gusen I, II, and III; Ebensee; Melk; Gunskirchen," and states that by March 1945 approximately 64,000 of 83,000 total prisoners were held in subcamps. Close the recordfor Melk
Mühldorf Muhldorf, Muehldorf, Mühldorf am Inn subcamp complex, Weingut I Deaths recorded here: about 4,000 of the more than 8,300 prisonersMühldorfer Hart memorial Where:Germany	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	GermanyGermany (Bavaria)	Open the recordfor Mühldorf
Mühldorf Mühldorf was the sister project to Kaufering: a group of Dachau subcamps whose prisoners, mostly Hungarian Jews, poured a vast arched concrete bunker meant to house aircraft production. It is included because Project Witness holds testimony from Mühldorf survivors and because the bunker still stands in the forest, one of the largest physical remains of Nazi forced labor anywhere. Notable for the surviving concrete bunker in the Mühldorfer Hart forest. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as subcamp complex of Dachau; construction of a reinforced concrete bunker for jet aircraft production Where Then Germany (Bavaria) Today Germany Dates Opened July 1944 Closed April 1945 How it ended May 1945. United States Army, early May 1945; prisoners were also loaded onto an evacuation train that was found by US forces. The toll about 4,000 of the more than 8,300 prisoners, by the Mühldorfer Hart memorial's count; USHMM estimates more than half, including those deported on to Auschwitz-Birkenau Figures from Mühldorfer Hart memorial; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Chances of coming out near-nil Subcamps several camps in the complex Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today Mühldorfer Hart memorial site How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM: "Dachau alone had some 140 subcamps, mainly in southern Bavaria." Close the recordfor Mühldorf
Plaszow Płaszów, Kraków-Płaszów, Zwangsarbeitslager Plaszow (forced-labor camp from 1942), Konzentrationslager Plaszow (concentration camp from January 1944) Deaths recorded here: thousands, mostly by shootingUSHMM Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Krakow District)	Open the recordfor Plaszow
Plaszow Plaszow was built on top of two Jewish cemeteries on the southern edge of Krakow, and prisoners were made to break up the gravestones and pave the camp roads with them. It held the Jews of Krakow after the ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, along with Jews from surrounding towns. People were shot on a hill inside the camp. Oskar Schindler's enamelware factory stood next to it, and he moved about 1,000 of his Jewish workers out of the camp system in 1944. Notable for the camp in Schindler's List, built on Jewish cemeteries. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp for Jews; concentration camp from 1944; killing site by shooting; holding camp for the liquidated Krakow ghetto Did it change over time? Yes. USHMM: "It was initially a forced-labor camp for Jews" established in 1942 under the SS and police leaders in Krakow, and it "became a concentration camp" in 1944. Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Krakow District) Today Poland Dates Opened 1942 Closed January 1945. USHMM: in January 1945 "the last prisoners from Plaszow were sent to Auschwitz." How it ended January 1945. Soviet forces reached Krakow in January 1945 after the camp had been emptied and largely demolished. The toll thousands, mostly by shooting; no reliable total Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Plaszow' What the institutions actually say USHMM gives no numerical figure, only "Thousands were killed there, mostly by shooting." Figures circulating online range widely and are not supported by USHMM's article. Chances of coming out hard About the photographs of this place Plaszow is the camp most readers will picture from a film, Schindler's List, rather than from a photograph, and the film's imagery is a dramatic reconstruction shot in black and white in a way that invites confusion with documentary footage. Genuine wartime photographs of Plaszow are scarce, and the Amon Goeth material that circulates is largely perpetrator-produced. The site today KL Plaszow Museum, a branch of the Museum of Krakow, opened on the site The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Plaszow camp was established in 1942 under the authority of the SS and police leaders in Krakow (Cracow). It was initially a forced-labor camp for Jews." ... "The original site of the camp included two Jewish cemeteries." ... "Thousands were killed there, mostly by shooting." ... "The German industrialist Oskar Schindler established an enamelware factory in Krakow, adjacent to Plaszow. He attempted to protect his Jewish workers, some 900 people, from abuse in Plaszow and from deportation to killing centers." Close the recordfor Plaszow
Poniatowa Zwangsarbeitslager Poniatowa Deaths recorded here: the SS and police shot between 15,000 and 20,000 Jews at Trawniki and Poniatowa together on November 3 and 4, 1943USHMM Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District)	Open the recordfor Poniatowa
Poniatowa Poniatowa held Jews who had survived the Warsaw ghetto, moved there in 1943 to work in Walter Toebbens's textile plants. It existed for about a year. On November 4, 1943 the SS shot everyone in it. Poniatowa and Trawniki together are what Operation Harvest Festival looked like away from Majdanek: a workforce the Germans had built and then destroyed within days of deciding that Jewish prisoners who had already revolted twice were too dangerous to keep. Notable for destroyed in a single day in Operation Harvest Festival, along with Trawniki and Majdanek. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp for Jews; killing site during Operation Harvest Festival Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District) Today Poland Dates Opened 1942 Closed November 4, 1943 The toll the SS and police shot between 15,000 and 20,000 Jews at Trawniki and Poniatowa together on November 3 and 4, 1943 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Lublin/Majdanek Concentration Camp: Areas of Research' What the institutions actually say USHMM's figure covers Trawniki and Poniatowa together. Across Operation Harvest Festival as a whole, USHMM states: "The SS and police kill about 42,000 Jews during Operation 'Harvest Festival.'" Chances of coming out near-nil The site today A memorial marks the mass grave site. How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The SS and police shot between 15,000 and 20,000 Jews in Trawniki and Poniatowa during Operation 'Harvest Festival' on November 3 (Trawniki) and November 3-4 (Poniatowa), 1943." Close the recordfor Poniatowa
Skarżysko-Kamienna Skarzysko-Kamienna, HASAG Skarżysko, Hugo Schneider AG Skarżysko Deaths recorded here: between 18,000 and 23,000 of the 25,000 to 30,000 Jews brought thereYad Vashem Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Radom District)	Open the recordfor Skarżysko-Kamienna
Skarżysko-Kamienna Skarżysko-Kamienna was a munitions plant run by the private German firm Hugo Schneider AG, known as HASAG, which used Jewish forced labor supplied by the SS and paid for by the piece. It is one of the clearest cases in the whole system of a private company profiting directly from Jewish slave labor and from the deaths that labor produced. HASAG ran a similar operation at Częstochowa. Notable for a private German munitions company running its own camps for Jewish forced labor. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as forced-labor camp for Jews run for a private German company; munitions production; killing site by shooting and by lethal working conditions Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Radom District) Today Poland Dates Opened August 1942 Closed August 1944 How it ended Not liberated; prisoners were evacuated to Buchenwald and Czestochowa in August 1944 as Soviet forces approached. The toll between 18,000 and 23,000 of the 25,000 to 30,000 Jews brought there, by Yad Vashem's count Figures from Yad Vashem What the institutions actually say USHMM covers the camp only through survivor oral histories, notably that of Abraham Lewent. Chances of coming out near-nil in Werk C; hard elsewhere in the complexThe camp was divided into three works. Werk C handled picric acid, which stained prisoners' skin and hair yellow and destroyed their health within months. Survival in Werk C was measured in weeks. Subcamps three works (Werk A, Werk B, Werk C) Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. The site today A memorial and mass graves are marked at the site; there is no museum. How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM publishes an oral history titled "Abraham Lewent describes conditions in Skarzysko camp" and records that at Skarzysko "prisoners were forced to make ammunition parts." Close the recordfor Skarżysko-Kamienna
Trawniki Zwangsarbeitslager Trawniki, SS-Ausbildungslager Trawniki Deaths recorded here: at least 6,000 Jewish prisoners of Trawniki and Dorohucza were shot on November 3, 1943USHMM Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District)	Open the recordfor Trawniki
Trawniki Trawniki matters twice over. It was a labor camp where Jews, many of them survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, made brushes and furs until the SS shot them all in a single day. It was also the school where the SS trained roughly 5,082 auxiliary guards, mostly Soviet prisoners of war and young men from Ukraine, and then sent them to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and to the ghetto clearances in Warsaw, Krakow and Lviv. The killing centers could not have been staffed without it. Notable for the training camp for the auxiliary guards who staffed the Operation Reinhard killing centers. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as training camp for SS auxiliary guards; forced-labor camp for Jews; killing site during Operation Harvest Festival Did it change over time? It ran as two things on one site: a training facility for auxiliary guards from 1941, and from summer 1942 a forced-labor camp for Jews. USHMM: the camp existed "from July 1941 through July 1944." Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Lublin District) Today Poland Dates Opened July 1941 Closed July 1944 How it ended July 1944. Soviet forces reached the area in July 1944; the Jewish prisoners had been murdered in November 1943. The toll at least 6,000 Jewish prisoners of Trawniki and Dorohucza were shot on November 3, 1943 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Trawniki' What the institutions actually say USHMM: on November 3, 1943, "SS and police units shot at least 6,000 Jewish inmates of Trawniki and Dorohucza." By May 1943 "at least 5,633 Jews resided in the Trawniki labor camp." Chances of coming out near-nil after November 3, 1943 About the photographs of this place The main photographic record of Trawniki is the personnel and identity photography of the guard training program, and identity-card photographs of Trawniki men have been central to postwar prosecutions. These are perpetrator records. The site today No museum. A memorial marks the site. How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "approximately 5,082 men" were trained as auxiliary guards. "By May 1943, at least 5,633 Jews resided in the Trawniki labor camp." ... On November 3, 1943, "SS and police units shot at least 6,000 Jewish inmates of Trawniki and Dorohucza," liquidating the workforce following the Sobibor uprising. Close the recordfor Trawniki
Treblinka I Treblinka labor camp, Arbeitslager Treblinka, Treblinka A Deaths recorded here: approximately 10,000 Poles, Jews and RomaTreblinka Museum Where:Poland	forced-labor camp Forced-labor camp	PolandGerman-occupied Poland (General Government, Warsaw District)	Open the recordfor Treblinka I
Treblinka I Treblinka I was a gravel-pit labor camp about a mile and a half from the killing center. Polish and Jewish prisoners worked the quarry and a nearby irrigation project. People were imprisoned here, held for months, and died of exhaustion, beatings and shooting. It is included in this directory precisely because its existence is the clearest illustration of why one word cannot cover both institutions. Notable for the labor camp that shared a name with the deadliest of the Operation Reinhard killing centers, and is constantly confused with it. Classification forced-labor camp Also functioned as penal camp for Poles and Jews Did it change over time? No, but its neighbor changed everything about how it is remembered. Treblinka I was established in November 1941 as a forced-labor camp and operated until late July 1944, outliving the killing center next door by nine months. Where Then German-occupied Poland (General Government, Warsaw District) Today Poland Dates Opened November 1941 Closed July 1944 How it ended July 1944. Soviet forces reached the area in late July 1944 after the camp was evacuated and its remaining prisoners shot. The toll approximately 10,000 Poles, Jews and Roma, by the Treblinka Museum's estimate; USHMM gives no total Figures from Treblinka Museum; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Treblinka' What the institutions actually say USHMM's Treblinka article does not give a separate death toll for Treblinka I. The 925,000 figure belongs to Treblinka II. Chances of coming out hard The site today Part of the Treblinka Museum; the gravel pit and execution site are marked The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "In November 1941, SS and German police authorities in the General Government established a forced-labor camp for Jews, known as Treblinka (later referred to as Treblinka I)." The article states it operated until "late July 1944." Close the recordfor Treblinka I

Transit and internment camps 13 of 61

A waiting room for a train. Conditions were often bearable, because nobody was meant to stay. The toll is measured at the destination. This group also includes four internment camps, often built by a country other than Germany for its own purposes, along with Theresienstadt, a transit ghetto where about 34,000 people died, and Sereď, a labor and transit camp.

How you tell: ask where the people sent there died; if the mass death associated with the site happened somewhere else, at the end of a train line, it was a transit camp.

Transit and internment camps. 13 of the 61 camps in this directory. Each row gives the camp, the deaths recorded there with the institution that published the figure, the kind of site it was, and where it is today. Open a record for the full entry.
Camp	What kind of site it was	Where it is today	The full record
Amersfoort Kamp Amersfoort, Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort, PDA Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp 661 people, 395 of them by execution Nationaal Monument Kamp AmersfoortDeported from here Not established Where:Netherlands	transit camp Transit or internment	NetherlandsGerman-occupied Netherlands	Open the recordfor Amersfoort
Amersfoort Amersfoort was a police transit camp in the central Netherlands, notorious among Dutch prisoners for its brutality, from which people were sent on to Vught, to German concentration camps and to forced labor in Germany. It was not primarily a camp for Jews, though Jewish prisoners passed through it. Notable for the Dutch police transit camp remembered for the severity of its regime. Classification transit camp Also functioned as police transit camp; punishment and hostage camp; briefly a Herzogenbusch subcamp from May to July 1943 Did it change over time? Between May and July 1943 a section operated as a subcamp of Herzogenbusch, with about 70 prisoners from the Jewish transit camp and about 600 from Westerbork put to work expanding a Luftwaffe shooting range. Where Then German-occupied Netherlands Today Netherlands Dates Opened August 1941 Closed April 1945 How it ended April 1945. Handed over to the Red Cross in April 1945; Canadian forces reached the area in early May 1945. The toll 661 people died in the camp, 395 of them by execution (Nationaal Monument Kamp Amersfoort) Figures from Nationaal Monument Kamp Amersfoort Chances of coming out hard About the photographs of this place Transit camps photograph as ordinary places. The site today Kamp Amersfoort National Monument The memorial's website How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "This subcamp, located in the former Police Transit Camp Amersfoort (Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort, or PDA), existed only for a very short time, from May to July 1943. About 70 prisoners from the Jewish transit camp and about 600 prisoners from the Durchgangslager Westerbork were put to work here." Close the recordfor Amersfoort
Bolzano Gries, Bozen, Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Bozen Deaths recorded here: Not establishedNo verified total. Where:Italy	transit camp Transit or internment	ItalyGerman-occupied Italy (Operational Zone Alpine Foothills)	Open the recordfor Bolzano
Bolzano Bolzano took over from Fossoli in the summer of 1944 as the main transit camp for deportations out of northern Italy, sending prisoners north to Mauthausen, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. It held Jews, partisans and political prisoners. Notable for the last main transit camp for deportations out of Italy. Classification transit camp Also functioned as police transit camp for deportation from northern Italy; forced-labor camp with satellite sites Where Then German-occupied Italy (Operational Zone Alpine Foothills) Today Italy Dates Opened 1944 Closed May 3, 1945 How it ended May 1945. The camp was emptied and handed over at the beginning of May 1945 as German forces in Italy surrendered. The toll no verified total Figures from Not established. What the institutions actually say USHMM's Italy article names the camp but supplies no figures. Chances of coming out hard Subcamps several satellite work sites in the South Tyrol Institutions count subcamps differently, so these numbers are not comparable between camps. About the photographs of this place Transit camps photograph as ordinary places, because comparatively few people died in them. The dying happened at the end of the train line. The site today A memorial wall in Bolzano marks the site; the camp buildings are gone How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "internment camps like Bolzano and Fossoli di Carpi in Italy were used as collection centers for Jews, who were then deported by rail to the killing centers." Close the recordfor Bolzano
Borgo San Dalmazzo Campo di Borgo San Dalmazzo Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here 329 Jews were deported via Drancy to Auschwitz on November 21, 1943, and 26 more via Fossoli on February 15, 1944; 20 of them survived Borgo San Dalmazzo deportation memorial Where:Italy	transit camp Transit or internment	ItalyGerman-occupied Italy	Open the recordfor Borgo San Dalmazzo
Borgo San Dalmazzo Borgo San Dalmazzo is a small entry that carries a large point. Jews who had found refuge in the Italian-occupied zone of southern France crossed the Alps into Italy in September 1943 when Italy surrendered, expecting safety, and were caught in the German occupation instead. They were held in this camp at the foot of the mountains and deported. Notable for the camp that caught the Jews who fled over the Alps expecting Italian protection. Classification transit camp Also functioned as transit camp for Jews who had crossed from France into Italy Where Then German-occupied Italy Today Italy Dates Opened September 1943 Closed February 1944 The toll 329 Jews were deported via Drancy to Auschwitz on November 21, 1943, and 26 more via Fossoli on February 15, 1944; 20 of them survived (Borgo San Dalmazzo deportation memorial) Figures from Borgo San Dalmazzo deportation memorial; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Italy' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "328 Jews from Borgo San Dalmazzo via Drancy to Auschwitz" were deported, "of whom ten survived." Chances of coming out near-nil once deported; ten of 328 survived About the photographs of this place Transit camps photograph as ordinary places, because comparatively few people died in them. The dying happened at the end of the train line. The site today Memoriale della Deportazione, Borgo San Dalmazzo How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "328 Jews from Borgo San Dalmazzo via Drancy to Auschwitz" were deported, "of whom ten survived." Close the recordfor Borgo San Dalmazzo
Breendonk Fort Breendonk, Auffanglager Breendonk Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp several hundred USHMMDeported from here Not established Where:Belgium	internment camp Transit or internment	BelgiumGerman-occupied Belgium	Open the recordfor Breendonk
Breendonk Breendonk was a First World War fortress ringed by a moat, which the Germans turned into a camp in August 1940. It was small, fewer than 4,000 people ever passed through, and it was used for interrogation. Jews held there were sent on to Mechelen and from there to Auschwitz. Because it was built of concrete and survived intact, it is one of the most physically complete Nazi camp sites anywhere. Notable for the most intact surviving Nazi camp structure in western Europe. Classification internment camp Also functioned as SS reception camp (Auffanglager); interrogation and torture site; holding site for Jews and resistance members before deportation Where Then German-occupied Belgium Today Belgium Dates Opened September 1940 Closed August 1944 How it ended September 4, 1944. The Germans evacuated Breendonk in August 1944 as Allied forces approached. USHMM states the Germans evacuated the camp in August 1944 and does not give a liberation date or unit. The commonly cited date of early September 1944 has not been confirmed against the Breendonk memorial. The toll several hundred Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Breendonk' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "Several hundred people were murdered in the camp through torture, executions, and harsh conditions," out of "fewer than 4,000 prisoners in total." Many more died after being deported onward. Chances of coming out hard The site today Fort Breendonk National Memorial The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "In August 1940, the Germans, who had occupied Belgium in May of that year, turned the fortress into a detention camp." ... "Fewer than 4,000 prisoners in total were confined in Breendonk during its existence." ... "Several hundred people were murdered in the camp through torture, executions, and harsh conditions." ... "With Allied forces approaching the camp, the Germans evacuated Breendonk in August 1944." Close the recordfor Breendonk
Drancy Camp de Drancy, Cité de la Muette Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp 127 internees Deported from here approximately 64,000 Jews were deported from Drancy, and fewer than 2,000 of them survived USHMM Where:France	transit camp Transit or internment	FranceGerman-occupied France	Open the recordfor Drancy
Drancy Drancy was an unfinished municipal housing estate northeast of Paris, a horseshoe of concrete blocks meant for working families, which the Germans and the French police turned into the collection point for the deportation of Jews from France. About 64,000 people were held in those courtyards and sent east on 62 transports. For the first two years it was run by French police, a fact that shaped French argument about the war for the next fifty years. Notable for the camp from which almost all Jews deported from France left, and the two years it was staffed by French police. Classification transit camp Also functioned as internment camp; transit camp for deportation of Jews from France; site from which property confiscation was administered Did it change over time? Yes in who ran it. USHMM: "Until July 1943, French police staffed the camp under the overall control of the German Security Police and SD. In July 1943 the Germans took direct control." Alois Brunner became commandant at that point. Where Then German-occupied France Today France Dates Opened August 1941 Closed August 1944 How it ended August 1944. The German administration fled in mid-August 1944 as Allied forces neared Paris; the camp was taken over by the French Red Cross. USHMM does not name a liberating unit. The toll 127 internees died in the camp itself; approximately 64,000 Jews were deported from Drancy, and fewer than 2,000 of them survived Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Drancy', for the deportation figures What the institutions actually say USHMM: "approximately 64,000 Jews were deported from Drancy in 62 transports. The vast majority ... were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans also deported between 3,000 and 4,000 Jews from Drancy to the Sobibor killing center." Chances of coming out routine while in the camp; near-nil once deported About the photographs of this place Several of the best-known photographs of Drancy were made by French or German official photographers for the occupation authorities and the Vichy press, including a 1941 set produced to show orderly administration. They show men in courtyards and queues rather than violence, and they were made by the side doing the deporting. The site today Mémorial de la Shoah Drancy, opened 2012, opposite the surviving housing block The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "the major transit camp for the deportations of Jews from France" ... "approximately 64,000 Jews were deported from Drancy in 62 transports." ... "Until July 1943, French police staffed the camp under the overall control of the German Security Police and SD. In July 1943 the Germans took direct control." ... "SS officer Alois Brunner became camp commandant." Close the recordfor Drancy
Fossoli di Carpi Campo di Fossoli, Fossoli Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here 12 transports deported 2,772 Jews from Fossoli in 1944, 2,338 of them to Auschwitz; separate transports took political prisoners to Mauthausen Fondazione Fossoli Where:Italy	transit camp Transit or internment	ItalyItalian Social Republic / German-occupied Italy	Open the recordfor Fossoli di Carpi
Fossoli di Carpi Fossoli was the main assembly point for the deportation of Jews from Italy after the German occupation of the north in September 1943. Primo Levi was held here before being put on the train to Auschwitz on February 22, 1944, and the opening chapter of If This Is a Man describes the night before that departure. Notable for the camp from which Primo Levi was deported to Auschwitz. Classification transit camp Also functioned as Italian prisoner-of-war camp; Italian Social Republic internment camp for Jews; German police transit camp for deportation Did it change over time? Yes. It began as an Italian POW camp, became an internment camp for Jews under the Italian Social Republic in December 1943, and was taken over by German police in March 1944 as the main transit camp for deportations from Italy. Where Then Italian Social Republic / German-occupied Italy Today Italy Dates Opened 1942. As an Italian POW camp in 1942; as a Jewish internment camp from December 1943; under German control from March 1944. Closed August 1944. Operations moved north to Bolzano in August 1944. The toll 12 transports deported 2,772 Jews from Fossoli in 1944, 2,338 of them to Auschwitz; separate transports took political prisoners to Mauthausen (Fondazione Fossoli) Figures from Fondazione Fossoli; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Italy' What the institutions actually say USHMM's Italy article names Fossoli as a transit camp used as a collection center for Jews "who were then deported by rail to the killing centers" but gives no separate deportation total for Fossoli. Chances of coming out routine while in the camp; near-nil once deported About the photographs of this place Transit camps photograph as ordinary places, because comparatively few people died in them. The dying happened at the end of the train line. The site today Fondazione Fossoli and the Museo Monumento al Deportato in Carpi The memorial's website How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Transit camps such as Westerbork, Gurs, Mechelen, and Drancy in western Europe and internment camps like Bolzano and Fossoli di Carpi in Italy were used as collection centers for Jews, who were then deported by rail to the killing centers." Close the recordfor Fossoli di Carpi
Gurs Camp de Gurs Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp some 800 detainees during 1940 and 1941 alone USHMMDeported from here 3,907 Jewish prisoners were handed to the Germans between August 6, 1942 and March 3, 1943 USHMM Where:France	internment camp Transit or internment	FranceFrance (unoccupied zone, Vichy administration)	Open the recordfor Gurs
Gurs Gurs was a mud field in the foothills of the Pyrenees, rows of wooden huts with no floors, built in weeks in 1939 to hold the defeated of the Spanish Civil War. Vichy then used it to hold Jews, including thousands of German Jews whom the Nazi authorities in Baden and the Palatinate simply pushed over the border in October 1940 and dumped on France. From 1942 the Vichy government handed its Jewish prisoners to the Germans for deportation. Notable for the French camp that held German Jews expelled from Baden, and the clearest case of a democracy's camp turned to Nazi ends. Classification internment camp Also functioned as French detention camp for Spanish Republican refugees and International Brigade members; Vichy internment camp for Jews and foreign nationals; holding camp feeding deportations via Drancy Did it change over time? Yes, twice. France built it in April 1939 for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. After the 1940 armistice it passed to Vichy, which used it to intern Jews, including 6,500 Jews deported across the border from Baden and the Palatinate by German authorities in October 1940. From 1942 it fed the deportations. Where Then France (unoccupied zone, Vichy administration) Today France Dates Opened April 1939 Closed December 1945 How it ended 1944. The camp passed out of German-directed use with the liberation of southern France in 1944 and was finally closed in 1945. The toll some 800 detainees died in the camp during 1940 and 1941 alone; 3,907 Jewish prisoners were handed to the Germans between August 6, 1942 and March 3, 1943 Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Gurs' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "During 1940-41, some 800 detainees died of contagious diseases, including typhoid fever and dysentery." And: "Between August 6, 1942 and March 3, 1943, Vichy officials turned over 3,907 Jewish prisoners from Gurs to the Germans; the Germans sent the majority of them to the Drancy transit camp." Of the Baden deportees, USHMM states that around 2,600, about 40 percent, were transported to Auschwitz after July 1942. Chances of coming out hard in the camp; near-nil once deported to Auschwitz About the photographs of this place Photographs of Gurs made under Vichy administration are official images produced by the authority interning the prisoners, and they show orderly rows of huts rather than the conditions inside them. Drawings and paintings were also made by internees, among them the artist Charlotte Salomon's contemporaries and the many artists held there. The site today Camp de Gurs memorial and cemetery The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Gurs camp was one of the first and largest camps established in prewar France." ... "In October 1940, German authorities deported around 6,500 Jews from the Baden region of southwest Germany across the border into the unoccupied zone of France. The Vichy government interned most of them in Gurs." ... "During 1940-41, some 800 detainees died of contagious diseases, including typhoid fever and dysentery." ... "Between August 6, 1942 and March 3, 1943, Vichy officials turned over 3,907 Jewish prisoners from Gurs to the Germans." Close the recordfor Gurs
Les Milles Camp des Milles Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here more than 2,000 Jews were deported from Les Milles, principally to Auschwitz by way of Drancy USHMM Where:France	internment camp Transit or internment	FranceFrance (unoccupied zone, Vichy administration)	Open the recordfor Les Milles
Les Milles Les Milles was a brick and tile works outside Aix-en-Provence where France interned German and Austrian nationals in 1939, a category that swept up many of the writers and artists who had fled Hitler. Between 1939 and 1942 the internees produced more than 400 works of art and murals on the factory walls. In August and September 1942 Vichy sent more than 2,000 Jews from here toward Auschwitz. Notable for the murals painted by interned artists on the walls of the tile works, which survive in place. Classification internment camp Also functioned as internment camp for enemy aliens; transit camp for foreign Jews seeking emigration; deportation staging camp under Vichy in 1942 Did it change over time? Yes. It opened in September 1939 in a disused tile factory to intern German and Austrian nationals as enemy aliens, many of them refugees from Nazism, and later became "a transit camp specifically for foreign Jews who intended to emigrate," then a staging point for deportation in summer 1942. Where Then France (unoccupied zone, Vichy administration) Today France Dates Opened September 1939 Closed December 1942 How it ended Closed by the French authorities in December 1942; not liberated in the usual sense. The toll more than 2,000 Jews were deported from Les Milles, principally to Auschwitz by way of Drancy Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Les Milles Camp' What the institutions actually say USHMM: total interned 1939 to 1942 was 10,000 people from 38 nationalities; more than 2,000 Jews were deported, primarily to Auschwitz via Drancy. Chances of coming out routine while in the camp; near-nil once deported The site today Site-Mémorial du Camp des Milles The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text Total interned 1939-1942: "10,000 from 38 nationalities." Jews deported: "More than 2,000, primarily to Auschwitz via Drancy." Artists held there included Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst and Karl Bodek, who "created the satiric 'Last Supper' mural" and was "subsequently murdered in Auschwitz." Lion Feuchtwanger was briefly interned and published a memoir, The Devil in France (1941). Close the recordfor Les Milles
Mechelen Malines, Dossin barracks, SS-Sammellager Mecheln, Kazerne Dossin Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here 25,257 Jews were deported from Mechelen, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau USHMM Where:Belgium	transit camp Transit or internment	BelgiumGerman-occupied Belgium	Open the recordfor Mechelen
Mechelen Mechelen was a single three-story army barracks in a Belgian city of 60,000, chosen because it sat on the rail line halfway between Antwerp and Brussels, where most Belgian Jews lived. Twenty-eight trains left it. It is also the site of the only successful armed attack on a Holocaust deportation train: on the night of April 19, 1943, three young members of the resistance stopped the twentieth convoy with a red lantern and opened a boxcar, and more than a hundred people got out. Notable for the twentieth convoy, the only Holocaust deportation train stopped by armed resistance. Classification transit camp Also functioned as transit camp for deportation of Jews and Roma from Belgium Where Then German-occupied Belgium Today Belgium Dates Opened July 27, 1942 Closed September 1944 How it ended September 1944. The Germans closed the camp in September 1944 as Allied forces advanced. The toll 25,257 Jews were deported from Mechelen, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a single transport in January 1944 carried 352 Sinti and Roma; few of the deportees survived Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Mechelen' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "Between August 1942 and July 1944, 28 trains carrying 25,257 Jews left Mechelen for German-occupied Poland; most of them went to Auschwitz-Birkenau." This represented over half of the Belgian Jews murdered. Chances of coming out routine while in the camp; near-nil once deported About the photographs of this place Transit camps photograph as ordinary places, because comparatively few people died in them. The dying happened at the end of the train line. The site today Kazerne Dossin, Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Between August 1942 and July 1944, 28 trains carrying 25,257 Jews left Mechelen for German-occupied Poland; most of them went to Auschwitz-Birkenau." ... "German authorities sent several trainloads of Roma (Gypsies) from Mechelen to Auschwitz later in 1943 and in early 1944." ... The Belgian Jewish underground "derailed several trains carrying Jews from the Mechelen camp to Auschwitz during 1942-1943," enabling approximately 500 prisoners to escape. ... "The Germans closed the Mechelen camp in September 1944." Close the recordfor Mechelen
Rivesaltes Camp de Rivesaltes, Camp Joffre Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here 2,289 Jews were deported from Rivesaltes in nine convoys to Auschwitz by way of Drancy Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes Where:France	internment camp Transit or internment	FranceFrance (unoccupied zone, Vichy administration)	Open the recordfor Rivesaltes
Rivesaltes Rivesaltes was a windswept army camp near Perpignan that Vichy used to hold whole families, unusually for the French camps, which meant it held large numbers of children. Jewish, Spanish Republican and Roma families were interned there. In 1942 nine convoys left for Auschwitz through Drancy. Aid workers from Swiss and Quaker relief organizations got some of the children out. Notable for a Vichy camp that held families, and the rescue of children from it by relief workers. Classification internment camp Also functioned as French military camp; Vichy internment camp for families, including Jews, Spanish Republicans and Roma; transit camp for deportation Did it change over time? Yes. A prewar French army camp became a Vichy family internment camp and then, in 1942, a departure point for deportation convoys. Where Then France (unoccupied zone, Vichy administration) Today France Dates Opened January 1941 Closed November 1942. Ceased to be a Jewish internment and deportation camp in November 1942; the site continued in other uses for decades afterward. The toll 2,289 Jews were deported from Rivesaltes in nine convoys to Auschwitz by way of Drancy (figure from the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes) Figures from Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes Chances of coming out routine while in the camp; near-nil once deported The site today Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes, opened 2015 The memorial's website How firm this entry is Parts of this entry are not yet verified to an institutional page. The fields say which. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM Collections holds photographs captioned "View of the Rivesaltes internment camp" and "Children in the Rivesaltes detention camp." Close the recordfor Rivesaltes
Sereď Sered, Sered' labor camp Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here at least 4,463 people were deported from Sereď between March and October 1942, and from September 1944 to March 1945 eleven transports from Sereď and several from Prešov deported about 13,500 more; about 16,000 Jews passed through the camp, most of whom perished Sereď Holocaust Museum Where:Slovakia	labor and transit camp Transit or internment	SlovakiaSlovak Republic (Axis client state), then German-occupied Slovakia	Open the recordfor Sereď
Sereď Sereď is the clearest example of an Axis client state building its own camps. From 1941 the Slovak government held Jews here at forced labor making furniture, concrete pipes and wooden toys. When the Germans occupied Slovakia after the 1944 uprising, Alois Brunner, who had run Drancy, took over and turned it into a deportation camp. Notable for a camp built and run by a Slovak government, later taken over by Alois Brunner. Classification labor and transit camp Also functioned as Slovak labor camp for Jews; transit camp for deportations to Auschwitz and other camps; concentration camp under German command from September 1944 Did it change over time? Yes. From 1941 to 1944 it was a Slovak-run labor camp; after the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 German forces took it over and Alois Brunner became its commander in September 1944, and it became a deportation camp. Where Then Slovak Republic (Axis client state), then German-occupied Slovakia Today Slovakia Dates Opened 1941 Closed March 31, 1945. The last transport left on March 31, 1945. How it ended April 1945. Soviet and Romanian forces reached the area in late March and early April 1945. The toll at least 4,463 people were deported from Sereď between March and October 1942, and from September 1944 to March 1945 eleven transports from Sereď and several from Prešov deported about 13,500 more; about 16,000 Jews passed through the camp, most of whom perished (Sereď Holocaust Museum) Figures from Sereď Holocaust Museum (Slovak National Museum, Museum of Jewish Culture) What the institutions actually say USHMM confirms the camp's existence and role but supplies no deportation totals for Sereď specifically. Chances of coming out routine in the Slovak labor phase; near-nil once deported after September 1944 About the photographs of this place Transit camps photograph as ordinary places, because comparatively few people died in them. The dying happened at the end of the train line. The site today Sereď Holocaust Museum, part of the Slovak National Museum, Museum of Jewish Culture The memorial's website How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "Slovak gendarmes, assisted by Slovak military personnel, units of the Slovak People's Party's paramilitary organization, the Hlinka Guard, and members of the Slovak ethnic German paramilitary formation Freiwillige Schutzstaffel (Volunteer SS), concentrated some 57,000 Slovak Jews in indigenously established labor and concentration camps, mainly in the camps Sered, Novaky, and Vyhne." Close the recordfor Sereď
Theresienstadt Terezín, Terezin, Theresienstadt ghetto, Ghetto Theresienstadt Deaths recorded here: Died in the ghetto about 34,000 USHMMDeported from here about 88,000 were deported onward and only about 3,500 of those survived USHMM Where:Czech Republic	transit ghetto Transit or internment	Czech RepublicProtectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (German-occupied Czechoslovakia)	Open the recordfor Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt Theresienstadt was an eighteenth-century garrison town in Bohemia that the SS emptied of its civilians and filled with Jews. It held Czech Jews on their way to be killed, and it held elderly German and Austrian Jews, decorated First World War veterans and well-known figures whose disappearance would have raised questions, under the fiction that they were being resettled to a spa town. Tens of thousands died there of hunger, overcrowding and disease. Most of the rest were put on trains to Auschwitz and the other killing centers. Notable for the camp the SS built to be photographed, and the cultural life the prisoners made inside it anyway. Classification transit ghetto Also functioned as ghetto for the elderly (Altersghetto); holding site for prominent and decorated Jews; forced-labor site; propaganda showpiece; Gestapo police prison in the Small Fortress, administered separately Did it change over time? Its function did not change so much as it was always two things at once: a real transit ghetto from which people were deported onward to be killed, and a stage set the SS could show to outsiders. The staging intensified sharply in the first half of 1944 in preparation for the Red Cross visit of June 23, 1944. Where Then Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (German-occupied Czechoslovakia) Today Czech Republic Dates Opened November 24, 1941 Closed May 1945 How it ended May 1945. The International Committee of the Red Cross took over the administration in early May 1945; the SS commandant Karl Rahm and his staff fled; Soviet forces then took control of the area. The toll about 34,000 died in the ghetto itself; about 88,000 were deported onward and only about 3,500 of those survived Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Theresienstadt' What the institutions actually say USHMM: deaths in the ghetto "about 34,000"; deported onward "about 88,000 people"; of those deportees "only 3,500 survived"; and overall "more than three-quarters of the Jewish prisoners sent to Theresienstadt died in the ghetto or after deportation." The ghetto death toll alone badly understates what Theresienstadt did, because most of the people who did not die there were deported to Auschwitz and the other killing centers. Chances of coming out hard in the ghetto; near-nil once deported onwardOf about 88,000 people deported out of Theresienstadt, roughly 3,500 survived. For most people sent there, Theresienstadt was a waiting room. About the photographs of this place A large share of the surviving photography of Theresienstadt shows people who look healthy, at concerts, at soccer matches, in cafes and gardens. Those are real photographs of scenes the SS staged in order to deceive. Ahead of the International Committee of the Red Cross visit of June 23, 1944, the SS ran a beautification campaign: about 7,500 people were deported to Auschwitz to reduce visible overcrowding, and the SS built a music pavilion, a playground, a theater, decorative signage, shops, a bank and a cafe, and took down barbed wire along the visitors' route. Then in August and September 1944 they filmed a propaganda picture, written and directed under duress by the imprisoned director Kurt Gerron, who was deported to Auschwitz and murdered after the filming. There is a genuine counterweight: the clandestine drawings and paintings made by imprisoned artists such as Bedřich Fritta, Leo Haas and Otto Ungar, who were tortured and deported when the SS found their work, and the roughly 4,500 children's drawings made in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis's secret art classes and hidden in suitcases. Those images were made by the prisoners about their own conditions, and they show what the staged photographs were built to hide. The site today Terezín Memorial (Památník Terezín) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "The Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto was a site where Germans imprisoned Jews during the Holocaust." ... established "November 24, 1941" ... deaths in ghetto "about 34,000" ... deported onward "about 88,000 people" ... "only 3,500 survived" ... "more than three-quarters of the Jewish prisoners sent to Theresienstadt died in the ghetto or after deportation." ... "Three international representatives visited Theresienstadt from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Danish Red Cross, and the Danish government." Before the visit the Germans ordered "an elaborate 'beautification' project" including "a music pavilion, decorative signs, a playground, and a theater. Barbed wire fences were removed." About 7,500 Jews were deported beforehand "to make the ghetto appear less overcrowded." Close the recordfor Theresienstadt
Westerbork Kamp Westerbork, Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Westerbork, Judendurchgangslager Westerbork Deaths recorded here: Died in the camp Not established Deported from here approximately 100,000 Jews were deported through it, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, where they were murdered USHMM Where:Netherlands	transit camp Transit or internment	NetherlandsGerman-occupied Netherlands	Open the recordfor Westerbork
Westerbork Westerbork was an orderly place with a hospital, a school, a cabaret and a football pitch, run day to day by a Jewish administration under German command, and every Tuesday a train left it for the east. That is the whole horror of a transit camp: the conditions inside were bearable precisely because nobody was meant to stay. About 100,000 people passed through, among them Anne Frank, who was deported from here to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, and Etty Hillesum, who wrote from the camp before her deportation. Notable for the Tuesday transports, and the place from which almost all Dutch Jewry was deported. Classification transit camp Also functioned as refugee camp established by the Dutch government; transit camp for deportation of Dutch Jewry; small workshop and labor site Did it change over time? Yes, and the reversal is the point. The Dutch government built it in 1939 as a refugee camp for German Jews who had fled Nazi persecution. In July 1942 German officials took it over and turned it into the assembly point from which Dutch Jewry was deported. Where Then German-occupied Netherlands Today Netherlands Dates Opened October 1939 Closed April 12, 1945 How it ended April 12, 1945. Canadian forces USHMM: "Westerbork was liberated on April 12, 1945, by Canadian forces who found 876 inmates there." The toll approximately 100,000 Jews were deported through it, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, where they were murdered Figures from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, 'Westerbork' What the institutions actually say USHMM: "From July 15, 1942 until September 13, 1944, the Germans deported approximately 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands via Westerbork." Destinations: "More than 55,000 Jews and 245 Roma were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; 34,313 Jews were deported to the Sobibor killing center; 4,000-5,000 Jews were deported to Theresienstadt; more than 3,500 Jews were deported to Bergen-Belsen." A transit camp's toll is measured in the destinations, not in the camp. Chances of coming out routine while in the camp; near-nil once on a Tuesday transport, particularly the Sobibor transportsOf the 34,313 people deported from Westerbork to Sobibor, a documented handful survived. The camp itself was survivable; the train was not. About the photographs of this place The most reproduced footage of Westerbork was shot in 1944 by the imprisoned photographer Rudolf Breslauer on the orders of the camp commandant Albert Konrad Gemmeker, who wanted a film showing the camp as an efficient labor operation. It contains the only known moving images of a deportation train being loaded, including a girl looking out of a boxcar door, identified since as Settela Steinbach, a Sinti child murdered at Auschwitz. The footage is indispensable and it was commissioned by the man running the deportations. A survivor's words Whoever hesitates, whoever dawdles, is being assisted; sometimes herded, sometimes shoved, sometimes beaten, sometimes punched. Philip Mechanicus · Source The site today Kamp Westerbork Memorial Centre (Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork) The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced directly from the institution named. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text "From July 15, 1942 until September 13, 1944, the Germans deported approximately 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands via Westerbork." ... "Beginning in 1943, deportation transports left every Tuesday." ... "After the Franks' hiding place was discovered on August 4, 1944 ... they were sent to Westerbork. They were then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 3, 1944." ... "Westerbork was liberated on April 12, 1945, by Canadian forces who found 876 inmates there." Close the recordfor Westerbork

The early camps, 1933 to 1936 4 of 61

The camps of 1933 to 1936, before the SS standardized the system. Most prisoners were released.

How you tell: ask when the camp opened and who ran it; if it was set up in 1933 by the SA, the SS, the police or local officials, before Himmler centralized the camps into a system, it was one of the early camps.

The early camps, 1933 to 1936. 4 of the 61 camps in this directory. Each row gives the camp, the deaths recorded there with the institution that published the figure, the kind of site it was, and where it is today. Open a record for the full entry.
Camp	What kind of site it was	Where it is today	The full record
Columbia-Haus Columbia Haus, Columbia-Haus Berlin, Konzentrationslager Columbia Deaths recorded here: Not establishedNo reliable figure. Where:Germany	early concentration camp Early camp	GermanyGermany (Berlin, Tempelhof)	Open the recordfor Columbia-Haus
Columbia-Haus Columbia-Haus was a former military prison in Berlin, in the middle of the capital, used by the Gestapo for interrogation under torture. It was demolished in 1938 to make room for the expansion of Tempelhof airport. It is included here because it disposes of the idea that the camps were all remote: this one was a twenty-minute walk from an airport terminal in a city of four million. Notable for a concentration camp in the middle of Berlin, demolished in 1938 to expand an airport. Classification early concentration camp Also functioned as Gestapo interrogation prison; concentration camp under the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps from 1935 Did it change over time? It held prisoners under Gestapo investigation and was formally a concentration camp from 1935 until it closed in 1936, when its function moved to the newly built Sachsenhausen. Where Then Germany (Berlin, Tempelhof) Today Germany Dates Opened 1933 Closed November 1936 The toll no reliable figure Figures from Not established. Chances of coming out hard The site today A memorial marks the site on the Columbiadamm; nothing of the building survives. How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM lists "Columbia Haus (Berlin)" among the earliest camps, which "held prisoners under Gestapo investigation until 1936." Close the recordfor Columbia-Haus
Esterwegen Konzentrationslager Esterwegen, Esterwegen moor camp Deaths recorded here: Not establishedNo reliable figure for the concentration camp phase. Where:Lower Saxony, Germany	early concentration camp Early camp	Lower Saxony, GermanyGermany (Emsland, Prussia)	Open the recordfor Esterwegen
Esterwegen Esterwegen was one of the first camps, a set of huts in the peat bogs near the Dutch border where prisoners were made to cut moor with spades. Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist journalist who edited Die Weltbühne, was imprisoned here and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 while a prisoner; he died in 1938 of tuberculosis contracted in custody. Esterwegen is in this directory to show what the camps were before they were what most people picture. Notable for an early moor camp, and the imprisonment of Nobel laureate Carl von Ossietzky. Classification early concentration camp Also functioned as early SA and SS concentration camp; moor reclamation forced labor; later a Wehrmacht and justice ministry penal camp Did it change over time? Yes. Esterwegen was one of the early camps of 1933 and 1934. When the SS consolidated the system it was closed as a concentration camp in 1936 and continued as a penal camp under other authorities, one of the Emsland moor camps. Where Then Germany (Emsland, Prussia) Today Lower Saxony, Germany Dates Opened August 1933 Closed September 1936. Closed as an SS concentration camp in 1936; the site continued in use as a penal camp until 1945. How it ended April 1945. Canadian and Polish forces reached the Emsland camps in April 1945. The toll no reliable figure for the concentration camp phase Figures from Not established for the 1933 to 1936 phase. What the institutions actually say The Emsland camps' total death toll across all phases and all fifteen camps is a separate and much larger question. Chances of coming out hard About the photographs of this place Photographs of the early camps were frequently made and published by the Nazi authorities themselves in 1933 and 1934, when the regime advertised the camps openly as a warning. Those images are propaganda produced for domestic consumption. The site today Gedenkstätte Esterwegen The memorial's website How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM identifies Esterwegen among the early facilities, alongside Dachau, Oranienburg, Lichtenburg and Columbia Haus, and states: "The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat." Close the recordfor Esterwegen
Lichtenburg KZ Lichtenburg, Prettin Deaths recorded here: Not establishedNo reliable figure. Where:Germany	early concentration camp Early camp	GermanyGermany (Prussian Saxony)	Open the recordfor Lichtenburg
Lichtenburg Lichtenburg was a Renaissance castle in Prettin used as a camp from 1933. Its importance is that it was the women's concentration camp before Ravensbrück existed, holding Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners and women the regime classified as asocial. When Ravensbrück opened in May 1939 the women were moved there. Lichtenburg is the missing first chapter of the women's camp story. Notable for the women's concentration camp before Ravensbrück. Classification early concentration camp Also functioned as early concentration camp for men; concentration camp for women from 1937 to 1939; predecessor of Ravensbrück Did it change over time? Yes, unusually. It held men from 1933, and from December 1937 it became the concentration camp for women, until the women were transferred to the newly built Ravensbrück in May 1939 and Lichtenburg closed. Where Then Germany (Prussian Saxony) Today Germany Dates Opened June 1933 Closed May 1939 The toll no reliable figure Figures from Not established. Chances of coming out hard The site today Gedenkstätte KZ Lichtenburg Prettin How firm this entry is Sourced, with one or two fields from the memorial rather than USHMM. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM lists "Lichtenburg (Saxony)" among the early camps and records that by 1937 only four camps remained: "Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Lichtenburg." Close the recordfor Lichtenburg
Oranienburg the 1933 camp KZ Oranienburg, Konzentrationslager Oranienburg Deaths recorded here: at least sixteen documented deaths during its sixteen monthsSachsenhausen Memorial Where:Germany	early concentration camp Early camp	GermanyGermany (Brandenburg)	Open the recordfor Oranienburg
Oranienburg Oranienburg opened on March 21, 1933, one day before Dachau, in a disused brewery in a town north of Berlin, run by the local SA. It held Communists, Social Democrats and journalists from Berlin. Most were released. It is included here to show the starting point: a camp with no gas, no tattoo, no railway, in a brewery, holding local political opponents, three weeks into the regime. Notable for one of the first camps, opened the day before Dachau, and closed within sixteen months. Classification early concentration camp Also functioned as early SA concentration camp for political prisoners Did it change over time? It was closed in 1934 during the SS consolidation of the camp system. It should not be confused with Sachsenhausen, built nearby in 1936, though the two are often conflated because Sachsenhausen was sometimes called Oranienburg. Where Then Germany (Brandenburg) Today Germany Dates Opened March 21, 1933 Closed July 1934 The toll at least sixteen documented deaths during its sixteen months Figures from Sachsenhausen Memorial Chances of coming out routineMost people sent to Oranienburg in 1933 were released within months. That is what a concentration camp was at the start, and it is why the word meant something different in 1933 from what it came to mean. About the photographs of this place The 1933 camps were photographed for the German press by the regime, and those images were published to intimidate. They are not clandestine documents. The site today Gedenkstätte KZ Oranienburg, in the town center, separate from the Sachsenhausen Memorial The memorial's website How firm this entry is Some fields need a second source. Sources The entry's main source Show the sourced text USHMM lists "Oranienburg (north of Berlin)" among the early facilities. "After December 1934, the SS became the only agency authorized to establish and manage facilities formally called concentration camps." Close the recordfor Oranienburg

Some sites resist the column. USHMM counts five killing centers and leaves Majdanek out; Yad Vashem's published list of death camps has six and includes it. The table gives each site one type in its row.

One type per row is not the same as one type per site. The killing center group lists four. Auschwitz is the fifth, filed on its own as concentration camp and killing center because both were running on the same ground at the same time. Majdanek is not in that five. It ran gas chambers and USHMM still does not count it; Yad Vashem does. The table files it as a concentration camp, USHMM's classification, and this paragraph is where the disagreement is recorded.

Majdanek was a camp near Lublin, and over there was five fields. That means every field had eight or nine hundred people and it was barracks and there's nothing to do Majdanek. The only thing you were Majdanek you did, you sit sometime all day long, and sometime they took you out to work and a half of them never came back.
Abraham Lewent, held at Majdanek. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. Hear it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: the source of this quotation

The figure at the top of this page is more than 44,000 and this table has 61 rows. Both are right. The 44,000 counts the camps, ghettos and other sites of incarceration that USHMM has documented for Nazi Germany and its allies; this table holds the camps people search for.

USHMM's Holocaust Encyclopedia was read directly for most entries. Where it has no article, the site's own memorial foundation or state museum was used.

Sub-camps are mostly absent, and the reason is arithmetic. Buchenwald administered at least 88 sub-camps by USHMM's count and 139 by the memorial's. They appear here only where people search for them by name: Kaufering, Mühldorf, Ebensee, Melk, Gunskirchen, Gusen, Blechhammer, Klooga and Mittelbau-Dora.

There are no prisoner-of-war camps in the table. The army ran those, not the SS, and they form a separate system with its own records. At least 50,000 Soviet prisoners died in the three linked POW camps at Bergen-Belsen, Oerbke and Wietzendorf, separately from the at least 52,000 who died in the concentration camp on the same ground.

Majdanek's toll came down, and the whole story belongs here, because a reader who has met 360,000 somewhere else deserves to know where that number came from and what replaced it. The 360,000 was published in 1948 by the judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz. In 2005 Tomasz Kranz, then head of the research department of the State Museum at Majdanek, counted again and arrived at approximately 78,000. He worked from what survives of the camp death book and the death registry, from the notices of prisoner deaths the Germans sent to parishes in Lublin, from testimony that SS men garrisoned at Majdanek gave at their Düsseldorf trial in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and from survivor accounts. The figure fell because the museum's own researchers worked from the perpetrators' records and sworn testimony. The museum board called the findings highly authoritative and asked that they be accepted with some caution.

That is not the end of it. USHMM puts the dead at 80,000 to 110,000 for the main camp alone, and at a minimum 95,000 to 130,000 across the whole Majdanek system. Compare like with like and USHMM's floor for the main camp still stands above Kranz's approximately 78,000, so scope does not explain this one away. Two serious institutions are counting the same ground and reaching different numbers. The entry carries both and averages neither.

Treblinka's depends on who is counting: USHMM gives an estimated 925,000 Jews, Yad Vashem approximately 870,000 people, and the Treblinka Museum between 800,000 and 900,000. Auschwitz appears as a single row.

What happened to the sites

The Germans destroyed the killing centers before the war ended, and they did it deliberately. Prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves and burn the bodies on grates made from rail track, then take the camps apart. At Belzec the ground was plowed over, a manor house went up, and trees and crops were planted so the site would read as a farm, with a former guard installed to work the land. At Treblinka they sowed lupine and put a farmer on the property. Sobibor was planted with pines.

It nearly worked. These are the sites with the fewest photographs and the fewest survivors. Of Chelmno, USHMM records that seven Jewish men are known to have escaped and that six of them survived the war.

The memorials were built to answer that. Treblinka's covers 22,000 square meters of concrete set with 17,000 stones. Two hundred sixteen carry the names of the towns whose Jews were transported there. One carries a person's name: Janusz Korczak, and the children. Belzec's opened in 2004: a straight path cut through the field of graves, sinking until its walls stand far above the visitor's head. At Sobibor, archaeologists uncovered the remains of the gas chambers in 2014.

Bergen-Belsen went the other way. British troops burned the camp to stop the typhus, on May 21, 1945 by the National Army Museum's dating. That is why nothing of the camp's buildings survives: the grounds today are mass graves and open heath. In the barracks nearby the British ran a displaced persons camp for as many as 12,000 survivors; it emptied in 1950 and the last residents left in 1951.

The Germans took the killing centers apart so that nobody would be able to say what had stood there. That is the part that failed. Max Steinmetz survived Dachau.

A snow-covered forest road at the Treblinka memorial in winter, with an inscribed memorial block in the right foreground and two stone blocks in the distance. — The road into the Treblinka memorial in winter. Treblinka, January 2018. Photo: Rakoon / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0. (Attribution is not required; Project Witness credits voluntarily.)

Postwar memorial photograph Rakoon · January 20, 2018 · Wikimedia Commons CC0: licence for The road into the Treblinka memorial in winter. Treblinka, January View the record: The road into the Treblinka memorial in winter. Treblinka, January

The most important message that I want to convey, at this time, is that I survived and I am alive today. Hitler and Nazi Germany did not win. I am grateful that I survived to be able to tell people what Nazi Germany did, not only to my family, but to the world.
Max Steinmetz, Dachau. Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, 'Messages by survivors and liberators.' Read it at the Dachau Memorial Site: the source of this quotation

The camps in dates, 1933 to 1945

March 22, 1933

The first prisoners arrive at Dachau

A disused munitions factory ten miles northwest of Munich. Hitler has been chancellor seven weeks.
July 1934

Himmler takes the camps

After the Röhm purge, Hitler authorizes Himmler to centralize the camps under a new SS Inspectorate. Until now whoever opened a camp ran it.
November 10 and 11, 1938

Kristallnacht fills the camps

About 30,000 Jewish men are arrested and roughly 26,000 sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Most are released within months.
December 8, 1941

The first killing center starts work at Chelmno

Roughly 700 Jews from the town of Kolo are murdered in the sealed cargo compartments of gas vans.
July 1942

Treblinka II opens a mile from Treblinka I

Between late July and September around 265,000 Jews are deported there from the Warsaw ghetto.
October 14, 1943

The Sobibor uprising

Prisoners kill eleven SS men and auxiliaries. Of roughly 600, about 300 break through the wire and the minefield.
January 1945

More than 700,000 prisoners are still registered

Nearly half are dead by the end of May, killed on the forced evacuations prisoners called death marches or by starvation and disease in the overcrowded camps.
April 15, 1945

The British take over Bergen-Belsen

No fighting, after several days of truce talks. Roughly 55,000 people are alive and thousands lie unburied.

Show the other 16 dates

October 1933

Dachau writes the rulebook

Theodor Eicke's punishment code and standing orders are later imposed on every other camp.
1936 to 1939

The prewar system takes shape

Sachsenhausen 1936, Buchenwald 1937, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen 1938, Ravensbrück 1939.
1940

Bergen-Belsen opens as a prisoner-of-war camp

Eleven miles north of Celle. More than 19,500 Soviet prisoners are buried in its cemetery by January 1945.
1942 to 1944

The subcamps multiply

By 1944 there are about 30 main camps and hundreds of subcamps beside factories and mines. At Buchenwald more than half the prisoners are already in subcamps by mid-1944.
March 1942

The camps are folded into an SS business empire

The Inspectorate moves into the SS Economic Administration Main Office under Oswald Pohl.
March 17, 1942

Belzec begins killing

The first Operation Reinhard center. By December approximately 434,500 Jews are dead and it closes.
Early May 1942

Sobibor begins killing

The second Reinhard center. About fifty German and Austrian personnel run it, with Trawniki-trained auxiliaries.
April 1943

Bergen-Belsen becomes an SS camp

The SS takes the southern section to hold Jews it means to trade. Around 2,560 are ever released.
June 1943

Belzec is erased

The graves are exhumed, the bodies burned, the site plowed, a former guard installed to farm it.
August 2, 1943

The Treblinka revolt

About a thousand prisoners seize weapons and set the camp on fire. Estimates of how many get out run from about 200 to more than 300.
November 3, 1943

Operation Erntefest at Majdanek

SS and police shoot approximately 18,000 Jews outside the camp in one day, the largest single-day, single-location massacre of the Holocaust.
July 22 to 24, 1944

Majdanek is captured almost intact

The first major concentration camp liberated. The Germans had no time to destroy the evidence.
March 1945

Bergen-Belsen's worst month

More than 18,000 die. Anne and Margot Frank are among the dead of that winter: the Anne Frank House says February, USHMM February or March.
April 4 and 11, 1945

American troops reach Ohrdruf, then Buchenwald

Ohrdruf is the first Nazi camp entered by American forces. Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley come to see it.
April 29, 1945

Dachau is liberated

Roughly 32,000 freed. On the way in the troops find more than thirty railroad cars filled with bodies.
May 5 to 9, 1945

The last camps

Mauthausen and Gusen on May 5. On May 9 Soviet troops enter Theresienstadt, where around 30,000 prisoners remain, and liberate Stutthof.

Questions people ask about the camps

Was Treblinka a concentration camp?

No. Treblinka I was a forced-labor camp. Treblinka II, a mile away, was a killing center where an estimated 925,000 Jews were murdered between July 1942 and September 1943. It held no comparable prisoner population because almost everyone brought there was killed on arrival.

What were concentration camps?

Prisons outside the law. The SS held people it called enemies with no charge, no trial and no release date, under a police order called Schutzhaft, protective custody. Prisoners were registered, numbered, marked with a colored triangle and put to forced labor. Killing on arrival was not what these camps were built to do.

How many concentration camps were there?

USHMM has documented more than 44,000 camps, ghettos and other sites of incarceration. That figure includes ghettos, prisoner-of-war camps and forced-labor sites, so it is not a count of concentration camps. Volume I of its Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos covers 110 early camps, 23 main concentration camps and 898 subcamps.

What is the difference between a concentration camp and a death camp?

A concentration camp held people. A killing center, USHMM's term for what are also called death camps, killed them. Arrivals at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II and Chelmno were dead within about two hours and were never registered. Only a small work detail was kept alive to run the killing.

What was the first concentration camp?

Dachau, ten miles northwest of Munich. The first transports arrived on March 22, 1933, seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor. USHMM calls it the first regular concentration camp of the Nazi government. Improvised SA, SS and police camps already existed. Dachau is where the system was standardized.

What happened at Bergen-Belsen?

It began in 1940 as a German army prisoner-of-war camp. In April 1943 the SS took part of it to hold Jews it hoped to trade for interned Germans. From December 1944 it became the dumping ground for transports evacuated from the east, and it collapsed. It killed by starvation, thirst and typhus.

What was Dachau?

The model for the whole system. It opened in March 1933 for political prisoners and ran until American troops arrived on April 29, 1945. Its commandant Theodor Eicke wrote the punishment regulations later imposed on every other camp. More than 200,000 people were imprisoned there and at least 41,500 died, by the memorial's count.

How many people died in the concentration camps?

There is no single agreed total, because the SS destroyed records and never registered many of the people it killed. One estimate cited by USHMM puts deaths in the concentration camp system at between 1,885,889 and 2,045,215, counting the Jews killed at Auschwitz and Majdanek. The per-camp figures are floors: at least 41,500 at Dachau, 52,000 at Bergen-Belsen, 56,000 at Buchenwald, 95,000 at Mauthausen. The killing centers are counted separately. Treblinka II alone killed approximately 925,000 Jews.

Were there uprisings in the camps?

Yes. At Treblinka on August 2, 1943 the camp's roughly 1,000 prisoners rose up with stolen weapons and set part of the camp on fire, and more than 300 got out. At Sobibor on October 14, 1943 prisoners killed eleven SS men and several of their Trawniki-trained guards. Prisoner undergrounds also took control at Buchenwald and Mauthausen.

What was the Sobibor uprising?

On October 14, 1943 prisoners at the Sobibor killing center killed eleven SS men, including deputy commandant Johann Niemann, and several Trawniki-trained guards, by luring them one at a time into workshops for fittings. Of roughly 600 prisoners, about 300 got through the wire and the minefield, and about 50 survived the war.

What was Theresienstadt?

A walled garrison town in Bohemia that the SS emptied of its inhabitants and ran as a ghetto and transit camp. More than 140,000 Jews passed through it, and the two institutions holding the records do not agree on the totals: USHMM gives about 34,000 dead in the ghetto and 3,500 survivors of the onward transports, the Terezín Memorial over 35,000 dead and 3,800 survivors. In 1944 the SS built a music pavilion, a playground and a theater to deceive a Red Cross delegation.

When were the camps liberated?

Majdanek was first, taken almost intact by Soviet troops on July 23, 1944. Soviet forces reached Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. American units entered Ohrdruf on April 4 and Buchenwald on April 11. The British took over Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Dachau fell on April 29, Mauthausen May 5, Theresienstadt and Stutthof May 9.

Were the concentration camps only in Germany?

No. The early camps and several of the largest stood on German soil: Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück. Every killing center stood in occupied or annexed Poland. Transit camps operated in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy, and Germany's Axis allies ran their own.

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Where this came from

Every fact here comes from a named source. Most of the images are public domain or carry a free license, and where the license asks for attribution the credit runs with the image. The two Petr Ginz drawings are the exception. Yad Vashem holds that work, and Project Witness publishes it on its own assertion of rights rather than under a license.

Bergen-Belsen For the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, on the exchange camp and the final months
Bundesarchiv For German Federal Archives photography of the camp system
Dachau For the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, on the first camp and on the Barrack X gas chamber
Imperial War Museum For British Army Film and Photographic Unit material from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen
Majdanek For the State Museum at Majdanek, including its own revision of the death toll
National Archives For US Army Signal Corps photography and the liberation footage
Project Witness For recorded survivor testimony, including Samuel Willenberg on the Treblinka revolt
Terezin For the Terezin Memorial and the Terezin Initiative Institute
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum For the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, the oral history collection and the photograph archive
Yad Vashem For the Shoah Resource Center and the testimony collection

Every image credit on this page

Map of Nazi concentration camps, prosecution exhibit at the Pohl Trial, Nuremberg, 1947. National Archives and Records Administration, 169155812. Plan of the two Treblinka camps. Tajchman Maria / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bedrich Fritta (Fritz Taussig), 1906 to November 1944, Wikimedia Commons; file page credits Jewish Museum Berlin. Drawing held at the Jewish Museum Berlin on permanent loan from the Fritta-Haas family, photographed by Jens Ziehe., public domain. Project Witness. Bedrich Fritta (Fritz Taussig), 1906 to November 1944, Wikimedia Commons; file page credits Ghetto Fighters House, public domain. Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. SS guard detachment on parade, Dachau, May 27, 1933. Photograph by Friedrich Franz Bauer. Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-01-16 / Friedrich Franz Bauer / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE Polish prisoners celebrate their liberation, Dachau, April or May 1945. Photograph by T/4 Arland Musser, US Army Signal Corps. National Archives and Records Administration, 111-SC-207743; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, photograph #83818. Bergen-Belsen photographed from the air by 541 Squadron, RAF, September 17, 1944. National Collection of Aerial Photography, NCAP-000-000-003-440 (sortie 106G/2946, frame 3051). Public domain. The memorial stone for Anne and Margot Frank, Bergen-Belsen. Photograph by Sipalius, CC BY-SA 4.0. Prisoners lined up for roll call, Dachau, July 20, 1938. Photograph by Friedrich Franz Bauer. Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-27-13A / Friedrich Franz Bauer / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE German-language chart of prisoner markings used in Nazi concentration camps, 1940s. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The railway siding to Treblinka, 1945. From J. Gumkowski and A. Rutkowski, 'Treblinka' (Warsaw, 1962). Public domain. Magirus-Deutz van found at Kolo, Poland, 1945. Archives of the Polish Ministry of Justice. Public domain. Jewish given names inscribed in the Ohel Niche, Belzec Museum and Memorial Site. Photo: Dreamcatcher25 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Aerial photograph of the Treblinka area. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Public domain. Aerial view of the Majdanek site. Photo: Fallaner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hoefle Telegram, January 11, 1943. The National Archives (UK), HW 16/23. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government License v3.0. Interior of a gas chamber at Majdanek. Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Bulletin Vol. IV (1948). Public domain. Map of Sobibor, summer 1943. Botterweg14 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dr. Julian Chorazycki, 1940. Central Medical Library of Warsaw (L. 1001, k. 7). Public domain. Smoke rising from Treblinka during the prisoner revolt, August 2, 1943. Photographed clandestinely by Franciszek Ząbecki, a Polish railway worker at Treblinka station. Public domain. Samuel Willenberg at Treblinka, August 2, 2013, on the seventieth anniversary of the revolt. Photo: Adrian Grycuk / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL. The remembrance avenue at Sobibor, photographed on October 14, 2013, the seventieth anniversary of the uprising. Photo: Anton-kurt / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. A Comet tank of 11th Armoured Division passes the gate at Bergen-Belsen, April 15, 1945. Photograph by Sgt Morris, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 3928. Public domain (Crown copyright expired). Survivors eat their first meal after liberation, Bergen-Belsen, April 1945. Photograph by Sgt Harry Oakes, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 4006. Public domain. Children learn to write at the school opened at Belsen after liberation, June 1945. Photograph by Sgt Hewitt, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 7802. Public domain. Three Polish girls, former Belsen prisoners, at the Swedish Transit Hospital at Cambrai Barracks, Luebeck, before travelling to Sweden to recuperate, 1945. Photograph by Sgt Evans, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums, BU 9221. Public domain. The unveiling of the Jewish memorial stone at Belsen, April 1946. Photograph by Sgt R Makin, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit. Imperial War Museums. Public domain. Treblinka, January 2018. Photo: Rakoon / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0. (Attribution is not required; Project Witness credits voluntarily.)

No Holocaust denial publication was consulted or cited. Sites that mirror encyclopedia text outside the publishing institution's control were excluded.

Words used on this page

Show the term

Displaced person (DP): A survivor or refugee living, after the war, in a camp or urban centre rather than at home. More than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons lived in them in Germany, Austria and Italy between 1945 and 1952. Almost all the camps had closed by 1952; Foehrenwald, the last, ran until 1957. Source: USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, Displaced Persons and Foehrenwald Displaced Persons Camp, for Displaced person (DP)

The concentration camps: the short answers

What were the concentration camps?

A concentration camp and a death camp are not the same thing

Try it: what kind of place was this?

The camp that was built to be photographed

Dachau

Bergen-Belsen

What a day was

The killing centers

Majdanek, and a number that changed

The revolts

Treblinka, August 2, 1943

What the soldiers found

Every camp, and what kind it was

Killing centers 4 of 61

Belzec

Chelmno

Sobibor

Treblinka II

Camps that also killed on site 6 of 61

Auschwitz

Hartheim

Jasenovac

Maly Trostinets

Risiera di San Sabba

Sajmište

Concentration camps 20 of 61

Bergen-Belsen

Buchenwald

Dachau

Flossenbürg

Gross-Rosen

Gunskirchen

Gusen

Herzogenbusch

Kauen

Majdanek

Mauthausen

Mittelbau-Dora

Natzweiler-Struthof

Neuengamme

Ravensbrück

Riga-Kaiserwald

Sachsenhausen

Stutthof

Vaivara

Warsaw concentration camp

Forced-labor camps 14 of 61

Alderney

Blechhammer

Ebensee

HASAG Częstochowa

Janowska

Kaufering

Klooga

Melk

Mühldorf

Plaszow

Poniatowa

Skarżysko-Kamienna

Trawniki

Treblinka I

Transit and internment camps 13 of 61

Amersfoort

Bolzano

Borgo San Dalmazzo

Breendonk

Drancy

Fossoli di Carpi

Gurs

Les Milles

Mechelen

Rivesaltes

Sereď

Theresienstadt

Westerbork

The early camps, 1933 to 1936 4 of 61

Columbia-Haus

Esterwegen

Lichtenburg