Dachau Concentration Camp Essay

During the Holocaust, many concentration camps’ inherited many Jewish people to torture until death. It all started in 1933, seven years before Auschwitz was set up. During the Great Depression, German democracy was destroyed. It was then replaced with the Nazi dictatorship led by Adolf Hitler. Even though the Nazi party had a popular voting system, Germans still rejected it in March 1933. Hitler wanted to keep the concentration camps going because he saw the benefits of terror without courts or judges. Therefore, Hitler supported the creation of a permanent concentration camp system under the Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler (“The Holocaust Explained”, 2022). After a war between German and Poland, the SS system included six purpose-built

Furthermore, Theodor Eicke created the organizational structure for the camps, making Dachau the model for other camps to follow. Dachau was also a laboratory for scientists to experiment with the inmates as their guinea pigs. Effects on human beings of sudden increases and decreases in atmospheric pressure, effects of freezing on warm-blooded creatures, infecting the prisoners with malaria (bad fever) and treating them with various drugs which had unknown effects, and testing the effects of drinking seawater or going without food or water were the tests on inmates. Shortly after those experiments occurred, the scientists and doctors were adjudicated at Nuremberg in the “Doctors Trial” in which seven were sentenced to death. Buchenwald, also known as beech forest, was one of the biggest Nazi concentration camps established on German soil in 1937. This concentration camp was in between Dachau and Sachsenhausen and housed political prisoners and targeted groups like Jews. The Buchenwald population increased rapidly after the Kristallnacht massacre against Jews when Jewish men around the age of 16-60 were arrested and incarcerated (Withlock, 2023). The prisoners

Extensive camp systems include three different types, concentration camps in which people were incarcerated without observation, labor camps, transit camps, and camps that served as killing centers also known as extermination camps. In 1934, Heinrich Himmler centralized camps that held prisoners under orders of “protective custody” under an agency called the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. He also appointed Dachau’s commander Theodor Eicke as chief of the IKL (“Concentration Camp System: In Depth”, nd). Shortly after that Richard Glucks replaced Eicke as Inspector of the concentration camps and he held that position until 1945. Even further, expanded camp systems include, Flossenburg that was established in 1938, Mauthausen was also established in 1938, Ravensbruck was a women's concentration camp that was established in 1939, Auschwitz was established in 1940 then later served as a killing center, and Natzweiler in Alsace was established in 1941. Concentration camps outside the reach of German Justice Authorities were a place where the SS could kill prisoners, which later became sites for the systematic murder of individuals or small groups of people. Those groups included Soviet prisoners of war, members of national resistance groups, groups of partisans, and the “Night and Fog” prisoners from Western Europe. German authorities created detention facilities to confine