Dbq 11 Concentration Camp

Concentration Camps

Concentration camps started when Hitler came into power. Hitler did not like the way things were being ran so he made sure he was in control. To insure that no one would take his power he made it where people were scared of him. The Nazis believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews deemed “inferior”. People were brought to the camps with force while others did not resist because they did not want anything to happen to them. The Shark Island concentration camp was the largest and worst concentration camp to be in. The first camp was founded in 1933. Millions of people were starved, tortured, and killed. The two largest groups of people in the camps were jews and the soviets. Many prisoners were

Heinrich Himmler took full control of the camps. Heinrich Himmler expanded the role of camps to hold so called “racially undesirable elements”, such as Jews, Romanis, Serbs, Poles, disabled people, and criminals. He was also the person who inspected the camps.By the start of world war 2 the number of people in the camps grew to 21,000, and it peaked again in January 1945 to 715,000 people. The numbers kept going up, so did the number of people dying in the camps. Newspapers started having more and more stories of people getting taken by the enemy. It made more people aware of what was going on with the concentration camps. Nobody had a clue of what those people endured while in those camps. There was around 1,200 camps which was run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Camps were created in dense populations often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews. They put their camps in logist places so if they need

Himmler and the SS closely shared Hitler's racial ideas. The SS was given responsibility for what the Nazis called their Final Solution the the Jewish problem. The Final Solution was the genocide of the Jewish people. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS’s security service, was given the task of administering the Final Solution. He created a special strike force, called Einsatzgruppen, to carry out Nazi plans, after the defeat of poland, he ordered these forces to round up all polish jews and put them in camps. In the camps people were living in tight spaces and the conditions were unsanitary. In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were given the new job of acting as mobile killing units. The SS death squads followed the regular army advance into the Soviet Union. Their job was to round up Jews in their villages, execute them, and bury them in mass graves. The graves were often giant pits dug by the victims themselves before they were shot. With millions of Jews being killed it was still slow by Nazi standards. Between 5 and 6 million Jews were killed, over 3 of them were in death camps. It was virtually 90 percent of the Jewish population of poland. Overall, the Holocaust was responsible for the death of nearly two out of every three European Jews. The leading citizens of the slavic peoples, including the clergy, intellectuals, civil leaders, judges, and lawyers, were arrested