The Camps

In 12 years, the Nazis had built more than 10,000 camps. Dachau, the first camp, opened in March 1933; the last closed with the liberation of Stutthof in May 1945. Nazis and their allies ran collection camps (sammellager), where prisoners were kept before transport; labor-education camps (arbeitserziehungslager); transit camps (durchgangslager); collection camps for the dying (sterbelager); large concentration camps (konzentrationslager) like Ravensbrück; subcamps administered by main camps (aussenlager) like Gusen; and extermination camps (vernichtungslager) like Treblinka. Two camps in Poland, Auschwitz and Majdanek, functioned as both concentration camps, where slave labor was used, and as killing factories.

In five countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, and Poland) I was able to visit 22 of the larger camps, nearly all preserved as state museums. Most of the 10,000 camps have been dismantled, while some sit abandonned by the railways in Poland without memorials or markers on maps. Others like Auschwitz are tourist attractions that receive 500,000 annual visitors. Take a tour.

Nazi Medicine

From the start of the Nazi reign, the medical and scientific community was enlisted in the Nazi's criminal sterilization, "euthanasia," scientific research, and genocidal programs. They gave creedence to the Nazi racial theories that called for the extermination of "useless eaters" and so-called subhuman species, such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. Nazi doctors, psychiatrists, and anthropologists abetted the Nazi regime without any significant protest within their professional establishment. After the war, those who did not commit suicide or who were not jailed returned to their posts and practices, saying they were not involved.

Nazi laws passed in their first three years of power let doctors and health professionals forcibly sterilize "undesirable" groups, such as gypsies, the mentally ill, and mixed-race children. At least 320,000 persons were sterilized by radiation methods. Next, Nazis working with mental hospitals and through the T4 office in Berlin killed about 70,000 mentally ill persons in sanitoriums throughout Germany and occupied lands from 1939 to 1941, when protests by prominent Germans halted the practices. By then, T4 personnel were sent to the east and to help set up death camps. From 1941 on, doctors and anthropologists served throughout the concentration and death camps aiding the mass murders and performing criminal medical experiments on innocent civilians. The scale of these crimes has been unmatched by any other criminal medical community since.Take a tour of Nazi medical pathology rooms and facilities in the camps.

Camp Locations

The Nazis built their camps along railway lines throughout occupied Europe. Camps were found in nearly every occupied country, with the most infamous death camps (Chelmno, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Majdanek) built in occupied Poland. See this map of Europe for locations.