On April 27, 1940, the first Auschwitz concentration camp was created, designed for the mass extermination of people.

Concentration camp - places for forced isolation of real or perceived opponents of the state, the political regime, etc. Unlike prisons, ordinary camps for prisoners of war and refugees, concentration camps were created by special decrees during the war, the aggravation of the political struggle.

In fascist Germany, concentration camps are an instrument of mass state terror and genocide. Although the term "concentration camp" was used to refer to all Nazi camps, there were actually several types of camps, and the concentration camp was just one of them.

Other types of camps included labor and hard labor camps, extermination camps, transit camps, and POW camps. As the war progressed, the distinction between concentration camps and labor camps became increasingly blurred, as hard labor was used in the concentration camps as well.

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were created after the Nazis came to power in order to isolate and repress opponents of the Nazi regime. The first concentration camp in Germany was established near Dachau in March 1933.

By the beginning of World War II, 300 thousand German, Austrian and Czech anti-fascists were in prisons and concentration camps in Germany. In subsequent years, Nazi Germany created a gigantic network of concentration camps on the territory of the European countries it occupied, turned into places for the organized systematic murder of millions of people.

Fascist concentration camps were intended for the physical destruction of entire peoples, primarily Slavic; total extermination of Jews, Gypsies. To do this, they were equipped with gas chambers, gas chambers and other means of mass extermination of people, crematoria.

(Military Encyclopedia. Chairman of the Main Editorial Commission S.B. Ivanov. Military Publishing. Moscow. In 8 volumes - 2004. ISBN 5 - 203 01875 - 8)

There were even special death camps (destruction), where the liquidation of prisoners went on at a continuous and accelerated pace. These camps were designed and built not as places of detention, but as death factories. It was assumed that in these camps, people doomed to death had to spend literally a few hours. In such camps, a well-functioning conveyor was built, turning several thousand people a day into ashes. These include Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka and others.

Concentration camp prisoners were deprived of their freedom and the ability to make decisions. The SS strictly controlled all aspects of their lives. Violators of the order were severely punished, subjected to beatings, solitary confinement, deprivation of food and other forms of punishment. Prisoners were classified according to their place of birth and reasons for imprisonment.

Initially, prisoners in the camps were divided into four groups: political opponents of the regime, representatives of "inferior races", criminals and "unreliable elements". The second group, including Gypsies and Jews, was subject to unconditional physical extermination and was kept in separate barracks.

They were subjected to the most cruel treatment by the SS guards, they were starved, sent to the most exhausting work. Among the political prisoners were members of anti-Nazi parties, primarily communists and social democrats, members of the Nazi party accused of serious crimes, listeners of foreign radio, members of various religious sects. Among the "unreliable" were homosexuals, alarmists, dissatisfied, etc.

The concentration camps also housed criminals who were used by the administration as overseers of political prisoners.

All prisoners of the concentration camps were required to wear distinctive signs on their clothes, including a serial number and a colored triangle ("Winkel") on the left side of the chest and right knee. (In Auschwitz, the serial number was tattooed on the left forearm.) All political prisoners wore a red triangle, criminals - green, "unreliable" - black, homosexuals - pink, gypsies - brown.

In addition to the classification triangle, the Jews also wore yellow, as well as a six-pointed "Star of David". A Jew who violated racial laws ("racial defiler") had to wear a black border around a green or yellow triangle.

Foreigners also had their own distinctive signs (the French wore a sewn letter "F", the Poles - "P", etc.). The letter "K" denoted a war criminal (Kriegsverbrecher), the letter "A" denoted a violator of labor discipline (from German Arbeit - "work"). The feeble-minded wore the patch Blid - "fool". Prisoners who participated or were suspected of escaping were required to wear a red and white target on their chest and back.

The total number of concentration camps, their branches, prisons, ghettos in the occupied countries of Europe and in Germany itself, where people were kept and destroyed in the most difficult conditions by various methods and means, is 14,033 points.

Of the 18 million citizens of European countries who passed through camps for various purposes, including concentration camps, more than 11 million people were killed.

The system of concentration camps in Germany was liquidated along with the defeat of Hitlerism, condemned in the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as a crime against humanity.

Currently, Germany has adopted the division of places of forced detention of people during the Second World War into concentration camps and "other places of forced detention, under conditions equated to concentration camps," in which, as a rule, forced labor was used.

The list of concentration camps includes approximately 1,650 names of concentration camps of the international classification (main and their external teams).

On the territory of Belarus, 21 camps were approved as "other places", on the territory of Ukraine - 27 camps, on the territory of Lithuania - 9, Latvia - 2 (Salaspils and Valmiera).

On the territory of the Russian Federation, places of detention in the city of Roslavl (camp 130), the village of Uritsky (camp 142) and Gatchina are recognized as "other places".

List of camps recognized by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany as concentration camps (1939-1945)

1.Arbeitsdorf (Germany)
2. Auschwitz/Oswiecim-Birkenau (Poland)
3. Bergen-Belsen (Germany)
4. Buchenwald (Germany)
5. Warsaw (Poland)
6. Herzogenbusch (Netherlands)
7. Gross-Rosen (Germany)
8. Dachau (Germany)
9. Kauen/Kaunas (Lithuania)
10. Krakow-Plaschow (Poland)
11. Sachsenhausen (GDR‑FRG)
12. Lublin/Majdanek (Poland)
13. Mauthausen (Austria)
14. Mittelbau-Dora (Germany)
15. Natzweiler (France)
16. Neuengamme (Germany)
17. Niederhagen-Wewelsburg (Germany)
18. Ravensbrück (Germany)
19. Riga-Kaiserwald (Latvia)
20. Faifara/Vaivara (Estonia)
21. Flossenburg (Germany)
22. Stutthof (Poland).

Major Nazi concentration camps

Buchenwald is one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. It was created in 1937 in the vicinity of the city of Weimar (Germany). Originally called Ettersberg. Had 66 branches and external working teams. The largest ones: "Dora" (near the city of Nordhausen), "Laura" (near the city of Saalfeld) and "Ohrdruf" (in Thuringia), where the FAA projectiles were mounted. From 1937 to 1945 about 239 thousand people were prisoners of the camp. In total, 56 thousand prisoners of 18 nationalities were tortured in Buchenwald.

The camp was liberated on April 10, 1945 by units of the 80th US division. In 1958, a memorial complex dedicated to him was opened in Buchenwald. heroes and victims of the concentration camp.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau), also known by the German names Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a complex of German concentration camps located in 1940-1945. in southern Poland, 60 km west of Krakow. The complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz-1 (served as the administrative center of the entire complex), Auschwitz-2 (also known as Birkenau, "death camp"), Auschwitz-3 (a group of approximately 45 small camps created at factories and mines around general complex).

More than 4 million people died in Auschwitz, including more than 1.2 million Jews, 140 thousand Poles, 20 thousand Gypsies, 10 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and tens of thousands of prisoners of other nationalities.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. In 1947, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Oswiecim-Brzezinka) was opened in Oswiecim.

Dachau (Dachau) - the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, established in 1933 on the outskirts of Dachau (near Munich). Had about 130 branches and external work teams located in Southern Germany. More than 250 thousand people from 24 countries were prisoners of Dachau; about 70 thousand people were tortured or killed (including about 12 thousand Soviet citizens).

In 1960, a monument to the dead was unveiled in Dachau.

Majdanek (Majdanek) - a Nazi concentration camp, was created in the suburbs of the Polish city of Lublin in 1941. It had branches in southeastern Poland: Budzyn (near Krasnik), Plaszow (near Krakow), Travniki (near Vepshem), two camps in Lublin. According to the Nuremberg trials, in 1941-1944. in the camp, the Nazis destroyed about 1.5 million people of various nationalities. The camp was liberated by Soviet troops on July 23, 1944. In 1947, a museum and research institute was opened in Majdanek.

Treblinka - Nazi concentration camps near the station. Treblinka in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland. In Treblinka I (1941-1944, the so-called labor camp), about 10 thousand people died, in Treblinka II (1942-1943, an extermination camp) - about 800 thousand people (mostly Jews). In August 1943, in Treblinka II, the Nazis suppressed an uprising of prisoners, after which the camp was liquidated. The Treblinka I camp was liquidated in July 1944 when the Soviet troops approached.

In 1964, on the site of Treblinka II, a memorial symbolic cemetery for the victims of fascist terror was opened: 17,000 tombstones made of irregularly shaped stones, a monument-mausoleum.

Ravensbruck (Ravensbruck) - a concentration camp was founded near the city of Furstenberg in 1938 as an exclusively female camp, but later a small camp for men and another for girls were created nearby. In 1939-1945. 132,000 women and several hundred children from 23 European countries passed through the death camp. 93 thousand people were destroyed. On April 30, 1945, the prisoners of Ravensbrück were liberated by the soldiers of the Soviet army.

Mauthausen (Mauthausen) - a concentration camp was established in July 1938, 4 km from the city of Mauthausen (Austria) as a branch of the Dachau concentration camp. Since March 1939 - an independent camp. In 1940, it was merged with the Gusen concentration camp and became known as Mauthausen-Gusen. It had about 50 branches scattered throughout the territory of the former Austria (Ostmark). During the existence of the camp (until May 1945) there were about 335 thousand people from 15 countries in it. Only according to the surviving records, more than 122 thousand people were killed in the camp, including more than 32 thousand Soviet citizens. The camp was liberated on May 5, 1945 by American troops.

After the war, on the site of Mauthausen, 12 states, including the Soviet Union, created a memorial museum, erected monuments to those who died in the camp.

The concentration camps of the Third Reich (German Konzentrationslager or KZ) are zones of mass imprisonment and destruction of prisoners of war and civilians by the authorities of Nazi Germany for political or racial reasons;

they existed before and during the Second World War in German-controlled territory.

The first concentration camps were forced labor camps and were located in the Third Reich itself. During the war, millions of people were kept in the camps, including anti-fascists, Jews, communists, Poles, Soviet and other prisoners of war, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and others. Millions of prisoners of concentration camps died from cruel abuse, disease, poor conditions, exhaustion, hard physical labor and inhumane medical experiments. In total, there were about five thousand camps of various purposes and capacities.

The history of the camps can be roughly divided into 4 phases:

During the first phase at the start of Nazi rule until 1934 camps began to be built throughout Germany. These camps were more similar to the prisons where the opponents of the Nazi regime were kept.

The construction of the camps was managed by several organizations: the SA, the leaders of the police and the elite NSDAP group under the leadership of Himmler, which was originally intended to protect Hitler.
During the first phase, about 26,000 people were imprisoned. Theodor Eike was appointed inspector, he supervised the construction and drafted the charters of the camps. The concentration camps became outlaw places and were inaccessible to the outside world. Even in the event of a fire, fire brigades were not allowed to enter the camp.

The second phase began in 1936 and ended in 1938. During this period, due to the growing number of prisoners, new camps began to be built. The composition of the prisoners also changed. If before 1936 these were mostly political prisoners, now asocial elements were imprisoned: the homeless and those who did not want to work. Attempts were made to cleanse society of people who "dishonored" the German nation.

During the second phase, the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald camps were built, which were signals of the beginning of the war and the increasing number of prisoners. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Jews began to be deported to the camps, which led to the overcrowding of existing camps and the construction of new ones.

Further development of the camp system took place during the third phase from the beginning of World War II and sometime before mid-1941, early 1942. After the wave of arrests in Nazi Germany, the number of prisoners doubled within a short period of time. With the outbreak of war, prisoners from conquered countries began to be sent to the camps: French, Poles, Belgians, etc. Among these prisoners were a large number of Jews and gypsies. Soon the number of prisoners in the camps built on the territories of the conquered states exceeded the number of prisoners in Germany and Austria.

The fourth and final phase began in 1942 and ended in 1945. This phase was accompanied by an intensified persecution of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. During this phase, between 2.5 and 3 million people were in the camps.

death camps(German: Vernichtungslager, extermination camps)- Institutions for the mass extermination of various groups of the population.

If the first concentration camps of Nazi Germany were created for the purpose of isolating and interning people suspected of being in opposition to the Nazi regime, then later they (the camps) developed into a gigantic machine for the suppression and destruction of millions of people of different nationalities, enemies or representatives of the "lower" groups of the population - in countries who fell under the rule of the Nazis.

"Death camps", "death factories" in Nazi Germany appear since 1941 according to the racial theory of "inferior peoples". These camps were created on the territory of Eastern Europe, mainly in Poland, as well as on the territory of the Baltic countries, Belarus, and other occupied territories, in the so-called general governments.

Used by the Nazis to kill Jews, Gypsies and prisoners of other nationalities, the death camps were built according to special designs, with a calculated capacity to destroy a given number of people. The camps had special devices for massacres.

The killing of people in the death camps was put on the conveyor. The death camps for the mass murder of Jews and Gypsies were Chełmno, Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibor, and Majdanek and Auschwitz (which were also concentration camps) in Poland. In Germany itself, the Buchenwald and Dachau camps functioned.

Also, the death camps include Jasenovac (a system of camps for Serbs and Jews) in Croatia and Maly Trostenets in Belarus.

Victims, as a rule, were transported to camps in trains, and then destroyed in gas chambers.

A typical sequence of actions carried out in Auschwitz and Majdanek on civilians of Jewish and Gypsy nationalities immediately after arrival (on the way, people died in the cars from thirst, suffocation): selection for immediate destruction at the exit of the cars; immediate sending of those selected for destruction to the gas chambers. First of all, women, children, the elderly and the disabled were selected. The rest were to have a number tattoo, hard labor, hunger. Those who fell ill or simply weakened from hunger were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

In Treblinka, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, only those who helped to remove the corpses from the gas chambers and burn them, as well as to sort the belongings of the dead, and those who served as guards of the camps, were temporarily left alive. All others were subject to immediate destruction.

The total number of concentration camps, their branches, prisons, ghettos in the occupied countries of Europe and in Germany itself, where people were kept and destroyed in the most difficult conditions by various methods and means - 14,033 points.

Of the 18 million citizens of European countries who passed through camps for various purposes, including concentration camps, more than 11 million people were killed.

The system of concentration camps in Germany was liquidated along with the defeat of Hitlerism, condemned in the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as a crime against humanity.

Currently, in Germany, it is accepted to divide places of forced detention of people during the Second World War into concentration camps and "other places of forced detention, under conditions equated to concentration camps," in which, as a rule, forced labor was used.

The list of concentration camps includes approximately 1,650 names of concentration camps of the international classification (main and their external teams).

On the territory of Belarus, 21 camps were approved as "other places", on the territory of Ukraine - 27 camps, on the territory of Lithuania - 9, Latvia - 2 (Salaspils and Valmiera).

On the territory of the Russian Federation, places of detention in the city of Roslavl (camp 130), the village of Uritsky (camp 142) and Gatchina are recognized as "other places".

Enlarge map
List of camps recognized by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany as concentration camps (1939-1945)
1. Arbeitsdorf (Germany)
2. Auschwitz/Oswiecim-Birkenau (Poland)
3. Bergen-Belsen (Germany)
4. Buchenwald (Germany)
5. Warsaw (Poland)
6. Herzogenbusch (Netherlands)
7. Gross-Rosen (Germany)
8. Dachau (Germany)
9. Kauen/Kaunas (Lithuania)
10. Krakow-Plaschow (Poland)
11. Sachsenhausen (GDR? FRG)
12. Lublin/Majdanek (Poland)
13. Mauthausen (Austria)
14. Mittelbau-Dora (Germany)
15. Natzweiler (France)
16. Neuengamme (Germany)
17. Niederhagen? Wewelsburg (Germany)
18. Ravensbrück (Germany)
19. Riga-Kaiserwald (Latvia)
20. Faifara/Vaivara (Estonia)
21. Flossenburg (Germany)
22. Stutthof (Poland).

Examples of heroic resistance of people doomed to death are known. Jews from the Szydlick ghetto, who mutinied in November 1942 in the Treblinka camp, were massacred by the camp guards; at the end of 1942, Jews from the Grodno ghetto offered armed resistance in the same camp. In August 1943, prisoners broke into the armory of Treblinka and attacked the camp guards; 150 rebels managed to escape but were captured and killed.

In October 1943, the prisoners of the Sobibor camp rebelled; of the 400 people who broke through the barriers, 60 managed to escape and join the Soviet partisans.

In October 1944, members of the Jewish Sonderkommando (those who carried the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria) in Auschwitz, having learned about the German intention to liquidate them, blew up the crematorium. Almost all the rebels died.

Sources: site specially for the site, author of the SNS, 06/19/11. based on materials
Holocaust on postage stamps
RIA News
military album

Horrors of World War

The Second World War was an event unparalleled in cruelty and bloodshed in world history. It really was global - practically not a single state remained in neutrality, joining one of the warring blocs. The belligerents were not shy about the means to achieve their goals. All possible and seemingly completely impossible means were used. Including ethnic cleansing, massacres and executions of prisoners of war and prisoners.

At this time, the practice of creating concentration camps was actively used, in which prisoners were kept for forced labor and other purposes. They were organized in Finland, the Soviet Union, the III Reich and other countries. Some of them were really used for hard labor, but there were also real death camps.

Auschwitz

The first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were set up to isolate and intern persons suspected of opposition to the Nazi regime, but they soon developed into a gigantic machine for the suppression and destruction of millions of people of different nationalities, enemies or members of the "lower" groups of the population in accordance with the policy of racial purity new world order. Jews, gypsies and ordinary prisoners and prisoners of war were brought from all the occupied territories.

The sad record in the destruction of people belongs to a complex of camps in southern Poland near the city of Auschwitz (Polish Oświęcim-Brzezinka, German Auschwitz-Birkenau). It has not been possible to establish the exact numbers of the dead so far, since those who arrived could be "sent for processing" immediately by trains, without exact lists and name lists. About 1,300,000 people passed through this death camp, of which about 1,000,000 died.

gas chambers

People were taken by trains, quick sorted into potentially useful for work or experiments, and all other prisoners unsuitable for current purposes were sent to "baths", which were actually gas chambers.

A museum was created on the territory of the camp in 1947, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

March 19th, 2015 , 09:17 am

A month ago, I toured the former concentration camps in Germany and Poland. There were several hundred such camps in the thirties and forties of the last century in Germany and in the occupied territories. I visited the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz, Poland), Sachsenhausen (near Berlin) and Dachau (near Munich). Now there are organized museums visited by people from different countries.

Camps began to be built in Germany in the early thirties, with the rise of the Nazis. Initially, the camps had a corrective labor function; they sent criminal and political criminals. Later, representatives of the "lower races" (Jews, Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and, with the outbreak of war, prisoners of war and some residents of the occupied territories began to be sent to the camps.

In accordance with Hitler's plan, the complete annihilation of Jews and Gypsies was supposed, as well as a reduction in the number of Slavs and people of some other nationalities. By the beginning of the forties, some camps were reoriented to the mass extermination of people.

Deportation of the Jewish population of Amsterdam to a transit camp. Photograph 1942

Prisoners were brought to the camps in cramped boxcars, devoid of basic amenities. In these wagons, people spent up to several days, until they finally arrived at the camp.

Birkenau camp gate

The railway line, along which trains with prisoners arrived

Unloading prisoners at Birkenau

Arriving at Auschwitz

Arriving lined up in a long line for sorting. People unfit for work, including almost all the children who arrived, were built into a separate column, intended for destruction in the gas chamber. The second group of people were selected for hard work. The third group, which included many children, especially twins, was selected for medical experiments. A small number of women were selected to work as servants in the families of the camp administration.

sort queue

sort queue

From the memoirs of the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, Rudolf Hess:

Already during the sorting process, there were many incidents on the ramp. Because of the fact that families were divided, because of the separation of men from women and children, the whole transport came into great excitement. Further selection of able-bodied intensified this confusion. After all, family members wanted to stay together anyway. Those selected went back to their families, or mothers with children tried to get to their husbands or to older children selected for work. Often there was such a commotion that the sorting had to be done again. Often had to restore order by force. Jews have very developed family feelings. They stick to each other like a burdock.

Railway station on the territory of Birkenau

This elderly woman was sent from the car straight to the gas chamber. Birkenau, 1944

Arrived at the Birkenau camp after sorting. Those on the left in the frame will now go to the gas chamber, but do not yet know about it

The form of social organization and at the same time the ideology that existed in Germany in the 1930s was called National Socialism, or, for short, Nazism. In relation to Germany of that time, the word “fascism” is often used, but it is more correct to speak of Nazism, that is, the combination of socialism with nationalism.

Adolf Hitler wrote: “Socialism is the doctrine of how to take care of the common good… We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. For us, the race and the state are a single whole..

To unite the masses in Nazi Germany, the rallying idea of ​​the German world was used, as well as the cultivation of hatred towards certain groups of people on a national basis (primarily the Jews), on the basis of faith, on the basis of socio-political convictions, and so on.

In foreign policy, Hitler's main idea was to expand the living space for the Germans, implying territorial expansion. This was supported by the majority of the German population, especially since before the start of large-scale hostilities on the eastern fronts, German propaganda managed to present the ongoing conquest of new territories as a matter to be solved bloodlessly or with little bloodshed and for the common good.

Thus, the Anschluss (accession) of Austria in 1938 was formally legalized by a referendum, during which 99 percent of Austrians voted for joining Germany. At the same time, Hitler's troops, observing possible correctness, were present in Vienna for three weeks before the referendum. The law "On the reunification of Austria with the German Empire" was issued, and Hitler said: "I announce to the German people the accomplishment of the most important mission in my life."

In the same year, Hitler appealed to the Reichstag "to pay attention to the appalling living conditions of the German brethren in Czechoslovakia." It was about the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, where many Germans lived. In the Sudetenland, they began to prepare a referendum on the accession of these lands to Germany, and German troops approached the border. Czechoslovakia, trying to contain separatist sentiments, announced mobilization and sent troops into the Sudetenland. But after the intervention of the world community, everything ended with the rejection of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, because otherwise Hitler threatened war.

As can be seen from these two examples, Adolf Hitler did nothing that could not be supported by the majority of the German population. On the contrary, such actions of "reunification" and "impossibility to leave the German brothers in trouble" increased the popularity of the leader. The same applied to the discriminatory measures against the Jews: they were explained not only by justice, but, during the creation of the ghetto, and concern for the safety of the Jewish population.

Members of the Hitler Youth (German youth organization) greet Adolf Hitler at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, 1937

It is impossible not to say that propaganda was exemplarily organized in Germany. In this day and age, with almost everyone owning a television, mass processing the consciousness of the majority has become easier than ever before. Nevertheless, it was the Nazi propagandists who achieved in their work an enviable perfection for many: they managed to rally the nation on the basis of the exclusivity of the German people, on the basis of hatred for various groups of people, and on the basis of the adoration of the Fuhrer.

Those who were part of this close-knit majority did not differ in any special negative human qualities. These were ordinary people, whose desire to be part of a strong society with a strong leader was skillfully played. Throughout history, Hitler and his entourage were not the first and not the last to do this.

Therefore, I am not writing here at all about the crimes of crazy sadists. Unfortunately, I write about how people honestly held views that they thought were right and which were approved by society, and how people did their job conscientiously.

Those who were "lucky" not to go immediately to the gas chambers or to the medical barracks for experiments were housed in the camp's residential barracks.

Entrance to the Auschwitz camp and the inscription "Work makes you free"

Dachau camp gate

The inscription "Work sets you free" next to the gate of the Sachsenhausen camp

Dachau camp fence

The ditch enclosing the Dachau camp

Premises for registering prisoners who arrived at Dachau

Rows of barracks and service buildings of the Auschwitz camp

The preserved barracks for prisoners in the Sachsenhausen camp

Birkenau camp barracks

As the number of prisoners entering the camps increased, their living conditions became worse; bunks were compacted in order to accommodate the maximum number of people.

Bunks for prisoners in the Birkenau camp

Inside the barracks of the Sachsenhausen camp

Photos of prisoners of the Auschwitz camp

Three-tier bunks in the barracks of the Dachau camp before compaction

Solid three-tier bunks in the barracks of the Dachau camp after compaction

Lockers for belongings of prisoners in the Dachau camp

Dachau prisoners

Accommodation for prisoners in the Auschwitz camp

Washing room for prisoners in the Sachsenhausen camp

Lavatory in the barracks of the Dachau camp

Lavatory at the Birkenau camp

The territory of the Auschwitz camp, fenced off with wire fences

In the morning hours, before going to work, prisoners were lined up on the parade ground. Public demonstration executions were also periodically held here.

Auschwitz camp. The booth of the duty officer in charge of formations

Construction in the Auschwitz camp. Picture

Construction. Drawing by a prisoner at the Dachau camp, 1938

The camp system of the Third Reich actively worked for the German economy. Prisoners worked in production, mostly doing hard work. In the Sachsenhausen camp, tests were carried out for the shoe industry, for which a special track was built with different surfaces for different sections. On this route, the prisoners walked forty kilometers a day in new shoes. Those who weighed less than the calculated weight were required to carry bags weighing up to twenty kilograms.

Shoe test track at the Sachsenhausen camp

One of the surviving prisoners of Sachsenhausen, Pole Tadeusz Grodecki, was arrested and sent to the camp in 1940, at the age of fifteen. For a long time he had to take part in the testing of shoes.

Tadeusz Grodecki, photograph 1939

At different times in different countries, psychological experiments were conducted in which people who did not have any unusual qualities and were not prone to cruelty participated.

The Stanford prison experiment showed that a significant proportion of people are susceptible to an ideology that justifies their actions, supported by society and the state.

The experiments of Solomon Asch showed that a significant proportion of people tend to agree with the erroneous ideas of the majority.

Stanley Milgram's experiment demonstrated that a significant proportion of people are willing to inflict significant suffering on other people when they follow the instructions of an authority, or these actions are part of their job duties.

American teacher Jane Elliott, in order to tell children about what racial discrimination is and to clearly show how people who are in the minority feel, divided classmates by eye color. Very quickly, the children were divided into a self-confident majority and a timid, despised minority (this seemingly ambiguous experiment was, as a result, correctly evaluated by its participants, who gained valuable experience).

Finally, the teacher Ron Jones, trying to comprehend the behavior of the German people in the thirties, in just a week successfully rallied high school students into a military-type organization devoted to him, whose members were ready to inform and crack down on those who disagree.

The most terrible crimes are most often carried out by ordinary people, and the whole question is only in the correct manipulation of public consciousness. And this is bad news. Because the generally accepted theses “I hate fascists” and “don’t forget so that it doesn’t happen again” can’t prevent anything.

For offenses in the camps, punishments were due, in many cases it was execution. The decision on punishment was made by the court, which consisted of members of the camp administration.

In the prison barracks of the Dachau camp

From the memoirs of Peri Broad, an employee of the political department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp:

Those sentenced to death are taken to the washroom on the first floor ... they cover the window with a blanket and tell them to undress. Huge numbers are written on the chest with an ink pencil: these are numbers by which it will then be easier to register corpses in a mortuary or crematorium.

In order not to attract the attention of passers-by, a small-caliber 10-15-round rifle was used on the highway, which passed not far from the stone wall ... In the back of the courtyard, several frightened gravediggers with a stretcher are waiting, horror has frozen on their faces, and they are unable to hide it. Near the black wall stands a prisoner with a shovel, another, stronger, runs out into the yard the first two victims. Holding them by the shoulders, he presses their faces against the wall.

Barely audible shot after shot is heard, wheezing, the victims fall. The executioner checks whether the bullets fired from a distance of several centimeters hit the target - in the back of the head ... If the shot still wheezes, one of the SS Fuhrers orders: "This one must get it again!" A shot in the temple or in the eye finally cuts off an unhappy life.

Carriers of corpses run back and forth, put them on stretchers and dump them in a pile at the other end of the yard, where there are more and more bloodied bodies.

Execution wall at Auschwitz

In camps in Poland and other occupied countries, not only executions of prisoners were carried out, but also trials of local residents and their subsequent executions.

From the memoirs of Peri Broad:

They bring in a 16-year-old boy. Hungry, he stole something edible from the store, so he was classified as a "criminal". After reading the death warrant, Mildner slowly puts the paper down on the table. Separately emphasizing each word, he asks: “Do you have a mother?” - The boy lowers his eyes and answers barely audibly, in his voice tears: "Yes." - Are you afraid of death? - The boy no longer says anything, only trembles slightly. “We're going to shoot you today,” Mildner says, trying to sound like an oracle.

In groups of forty, the condemned are taken to the locker room, where they take off their clothes. SS guards stand at the entrance to the morgue, where they are shot. Ten people are brought in. In the locker room, screams, shots, and heads hitting the cement floor are heard. Terrible scenes take place: children are taken away from mothers, men give each other hands for the last time.

Meanwhile, a murder is taking place in the morgue. Ten naked prisoners enter the room. The walls are spattered with blood, in the depths lie the bodies of the executed. People should approach the corpses and stand near them. They go by blood. Not one of them suddenly screams, recognizing his loved one in the man wheezing on the floor.

The right hand of the head of the camp, SS Hauptscharführer Palich, shoots. With a habitual shot to the back of the head, he kills one after another. The room is getting crowded with corpses. Palić begins to walk among the shot and finishes off those who are still wheezing or moving.

Often used and execution by hanging. Broad recalls the scene of the execution of thirteen Polish engineers who were sentenced for attempting to escape three of their comrades from the construction surveying team:

The ropes of the gallows were too short, a fall from such a height did not cause a fracture of the cervical vertebrae. Several minutes had passed since the stools had been removed from under the feet of the victims, and the bodies were still beating convulsively.

... Aumer used to say: "Let them twitch a little"

In the Sachsenhausen camp, hanging was combined with execution. A noose was put on the head of the sentenced, the legs were fixed in a special box, after which they practiced shooting at a stretched man.

Camp Sachsenhausen. Ditch for executions

Place of execution of Soviet prisoners of war in the Sachsenhausen camp

In many concentration camps there were separate blocks, what was happening in which was hidden from prying eyes. They conducted medical experiments on prisoners. The effect of bacteriological weapons, various vaccines, and exposure to extreme temperatures for the human body were tested on people. People were cut open alive, various organs were removed, limbs were cut off. In the course of experiments on the healing of bone injuries, tissue was cut out to the bone in people in places of interest to physicians so that doctors could see how the process goes.

Operating room at the Sachsenhausen camp

As part of the forthcoming "final solution of the Jewish question" and the reduction in the population of certain nationalities, experiments were widely carried out to sterilize women and men. There is a photograph of Frank Steinbach, one of the few survivors of the sterilized prisoners.

Frank Steinbach before deportation to the Auschwitz camp (later to Sachsenhausen)

In the Auschwitz camp, the medical department was headed by Josef Mengele, who conducted thousands of experiments on children, preferring to select twins for his experiments. On twins, it was more convenient to study the course of various diseases, to compare the results of various effects on “identical” people. In addition, Nazi medicine was looking for an answer to the question of how to increase the birth rate of the nation by increasing the number of twins born.

Mengele knew how to find contact with children, brought them toys, smiled. During the experiments, however, he did not react to the terrible cries of the children, but did his job, carefully entering observations in a notebook. As part of one of the experiments, Dr. Mengele sewed two children together and sent them to his barracks, where the parents of the twins, unable to see their torment, were forced to suffocate them.

Most of the experiments were carried out without anesthesia. This was done not only with the aim of saving it, but also with the aim of making the experimental conditions more natural; so that the experimenter can observe the live reaction of the subject.

Photographing during a medical experiment in Dachau

On the basis of the Dachau camp, experiments were carried out in order to determine the maximum height from which a person can parachute without an oxygen tank and stay alive. For this purpose, pressure was reproduced in special pressure chambers, corresponding to the pressure existing at altitudes up to twenty-one kilometers. During the experiments, many prisoners died or became disabled. Some of these experiments involved the dissection of an overloaded living person.

"Parachuting" experiment

In medical circles, the opinion is expressed that experiments on people carried out in the forties (and they were carried out not only in Germany, but also in Japan) allowed medicine to make a big breakthrough, and, ultimately, save many other people from death. To the question about the good for humanity or the tear of a child, everyone answers for himself.

Gas chambers were intended to kill a large number of people. They began to appear in concentration camps when there was a need for mass extermination of people, primarily as part of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Thus, most of the Jewish children were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival at the camp, since they were not suitable for work. Those prisoners who lost their ability to work already in the camp, or were sick for a long time, were also sent there.

In the gas chambers, the preparation "Cyclone B" was used - an adsorbent saturated with hydrocyanic acid, which emits poisonous gas at room temperature. Initially, Zyklon B was used in camps for the destruction of bedbugs and other disinfection measures, and since 1941 it has been used to kill people.

The existence of the gas chambers was not advertised. Although the majority of Germans supported the need to isolate the "enemies of the German people", they did not know anything about massacres or gas chambers. The rumors about their existence that penetrated the society were perceived as enemy propaganda.

The layout and size of the gas chambers varied from camp to camp, but it was always a well-organized conveyor belt, starting with a queue and ending with the crematorium ovens. You can see how this conveyor worked on the example of the Dachau camp. The comments of Rudolf Hess, commandant of another camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, are also valuable (as I said, the principle of extermination of people in gas chambers was similar in different camps).

Entrance to the building of the Dachau camp crematorium

To prevent panic, people sent to the gas chambers were told that they were going to the showers and that their clothes had to be disinfected.

In line for the gas chamber. Birkenau camp, 1944

People waited for their turn "in the shower" on the street, or in a special room, and when their turn came up, they went to the locker room.

Waiting room

In the locker room, people took off all their clothes. The members of the “Sonderkommando”, usually from the same country and the same nationality as those sentenced, did everything so that no one would guess anything. They started talking about life in the camp, asked about the specialty of the newcomers, and showed with their whole appearance that there was nothing to be afraid of.

From the unusual situation, small children often cried when undressing, but their mothers or someone from the Sonderkommando calmed them, and the children, playing with toys in their hands and teasing each other, went to the cell. I also saw that women who knew or guessed what awaited them, tried to overcome the expression of mortal horror in their eyes and joked with their children, reassured them. Once, a woman approached me while walking to the cell and whispered to me, pointing to four children who obediently held hands, supporting the smallest one so that he would not stumble on uneven ground: “How can you kill these beautiful, cute kids? Don't you have a heart?

locker room

From the locker room, the condemned went to the gas chamber and filled it tightly. In most cases, they believed that this was the shower room, especially since many gas chambers were equipped with water horns. But there were also those who guessed where they were brought. They tried to take those who raised a panic before entering the cell into the street, where they were killed with a shot in the back of the head.

From the memoirs of Rudolf Hess:

I had to go through a scene in which one woman wanted to push her children out of the closing doors and cried out with a cry: “Let at least my beloved children live.” There were many such heartbreaking scenes that did not leave anyone present calm.

Gas chamber room

When the chamber was filled with people, the doors were hermetically closed, and an employee in a gas mask threw cans of Zyklon B into the room through special openings.

Hole for throwing cans with "Cyclone-B"

Type of jar with "Cyclone-B"

Vapors of hydrocyanic acid caused paralysis of the respiratory tract in people in the gas chamber. Within a few minutes, remaining conscious, they died painfully from suffocation. Children usually die first. The maximum duration of the process was twenty minutes.

Water supply window (top) and viewing window

Half an hour after the Zyklon B cans were thrown into the gas chamber, its doors were opened and the ventilation turned on. Members of the Sonderkommando pulled out the corpses, removed their gold teeth, cut off the women's hair, after which the corpses entered the crematorium ovens.

Corpses of Dachau prisoners

Dachau crematorium ovens

The process of extermination of people in the Auschwitz camp is shown on a visual layout, where all the work of the conveyor is visible. There was no waiting room; people waited in the street for their turn.

Part of the model of the destruction system in the Auschwitz camp in the section: the queue for entry and the locker room

Part of the layout of the extermination system in the Auschwitz camp in the section: below - a gas chamber with dead people, above - crematorium ovens for burning corpses

From the memoirs of Peri Broad:

When the last corpses were pulled out of the cells and carried across the square to be thrown into the pits behind the crematoria, the next batch of victims was already being introduced into the changing rooms of the gas chambers. There was hardly enough time to clean clothes from the locker rooms. Sometimes the cries of a child could be heard from under a pile of things.(children were hidden in clothes not only by those who guessed what awaited them. Some mothers who believed that they were going for disinfection believed that it could harm the child's health - approx. A.S.). One of the executioners pulled the child out, lifted it up and shot him in the head.”

Auschwitz crematorium ovens

Auschwitz camp. Suitcases and baskets of people sent to the gas chamber

Auschwitz camp. Shoes of children sent to the gas chamber

From the memoirs of Rudolf Hess:

Of course, for all of us, the orders of the Fuhrer were subject to strict execution, especially for the SS. And yet everyone was tormented by doubts. Everyone looked at me: what impression do scenes like those described above make on me? How do I react to them? I had to look cold-blooded and heartless in scenes that stung the hearts of everyone who retained the ability to feel. I couldn't even look away when all too human impulses swept over me. Outwardly, I had to watch calmly how mothers with laughing or crying children went to the gas chamber.

One day, two small children played so much that their mother could not tear them away from the game. Even the Jews from the Sonderkommando did not want to take on these children. I will never forget the pleading look of my mother, who knew what would happen next. Those already in the cell began to worry. I had to act. Everyone looked at me. I made a sign to the Unterführer on duty and he took the stubborn children in his arms, pushed them into the cell along with the heartbreakingly sobbing mother. At that time, I wanted to sink into the ground out of pity, but I did not dare to show my feelings. I had to calmly look at all these scenes.

It's impossible to fix what happened. But can something like this be prevented from happening again in the future? A 100% working recipe has not yet been invented.

Turning to the events in Nazi Germany, many people prefer not to think about the nature of the phenomenon, but to limit themselves to clichés about hatred for the Nazis. However, these stamps lead nowhere. Moreover, a person may feel horror and indignation at the thought of sending children to the gas chambers, but this same person will do the same - for a different, just purpose. If someone competently presses certain buttons in his head.

Each of us can try to change ourselves a little, and by this change the world, by starting to think about some things. For myself, I formulate it like this:

1. Even mentally, discrimination of people on racial, national or religious grounds should not be allowed - despite the fact that there are cultural and other differences between different people.

2. Even mentally, no generalizations should be made that extend responsibility for the actions and thoughts of a part of a group of people (of any country, nationality, and so on) to the entire group of people. All people of the same country and nationality cannot act and think in the same way, and any generalizations are always incorrect.

3. Any public rule or opinion of an authoritative person should not be taken on faith, but evaluated according to their own moral criteria, based on their experience, their observations, and the desire to look at the world through the eyes of other people.

4. Work that can cause suffering to people and which at the same time raises the slightest doubt about its moral validity should be abandoned.

5. If what you hear from a person or in the media causes a desire to unite on the basis of hatred for something, you should exclude this person or this media from your life.

6. The thought of an individual person is more important than global thoughts about the nation, country, humanity.

Then there are chances not to get bogged down in the same things that people in Germany in the thirties got bogged down in.

P.S. With these words, the late Rudolf Hess sends greetings from the past to modern supporters of wars and massacres for geopolitical and other correct and just reasons:

The RFSS sent various party and SS functionaries to Auschwitz so that they could see for themselves how the Jews were being exterminated. Some of those who had previously ranted about the need for such destruction were speechless at the sight of the "final solution of the Jewish question." I was constantly asked how I and my people can be witnesses to how we are able to endure all this. To this I always replied that all human impulses must be suppressed and give way to the iron determination with which the orders of the Fuhrer must be carried out.

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many have lost loved ones who were killed or tortured.

In the article we will consider the concentration camps of the Nazis and the atrocities that took place on their territories. Actually about this and much more, our large publication ...

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

• political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
• prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

The concentration camps of the Nazis were notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Contained there, mostly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system.

Life in a concentration camp

Humiliation and bullying for the prisoners began already from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water and a fenced-off latrine. The natural need of the prisoners had to celebrate publicly, in a tank, standing in the middle of the car.

But this was only the beginning, a lot of bullying and torment was being prepared for the Nazi concentration camps objectionable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the letters of the prisoners: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry ... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured ...”, “They shot, flogged, poisoned with dogs, drowned in water, beaten with sticks, starved.

Infected with tuberculosis ... strangled by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. Burned ... ". The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. Doctor Mengele became famous for his horrific experiments on prisoners, from whose hand thousands of people died.

He investigated the mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they transplanted organs from each other, transfused blood, sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. He did sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such bullying, we will consider the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp ration

Usually the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

• bread - 130 gr; fat - 20 gr;
• meat - 30 gr; cereals - 120 gr;
• sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the food was used for cooking, which consisted of soup (given out 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150-200 gr). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for workers.

Those who for some reason remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a serving of bread. List of concentration camps in different countries

List of the worst concentration camps

Nazi concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. The list of them is long, but we will name the main ones:

On the territory of Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;

1. Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten; France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
2. Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
3. Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
4. Czechoslovakia - Kunta-gora, Natra, Glinsko; Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
5. Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
6. Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all the concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils concentration camp

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible concentration camp of the Nazis, because, in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and functioned from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and massacred, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors. Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned.

It was sent to medical research, during which more than 100,000 people died. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. The torture of children here was a routine affair that proceeded according to a schedule with meticulous records of the results.

Experiments on children

The testimonies of witnesses and the results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp:

• beating,
• hunger,
• arsenic poisoning,
• injection of hazardous substances (most often to children),
• performing surgeries without anesthetics,
• pumping out blood (only in children),
• executions,
• torture,
• useless hard work (carrying stones from place to place),
• gas chambers,
• buried alive.

In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity has seen in the New Age.

Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments. Children did not stay long with their mothers, usually they were quickly taken away and distributed.

So, children under the age of six were in a special barracks, where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died in 3-4 days. In this way, the Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year. The bodies of the dead were partly burned, and partly buried in the camp.

The following figures were given in the Act of the Nuremberg trials “on the extermination of children”: during the excavation of only one fifth of the territory of the concentration camp, 633 children's bodies aged 5 to 9 years were found, arranged in layers; a platform soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children's bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible concentration camp of the Nazis, because the atrocities described above are far from all the torment that the prisoners were subjected to. So, in winter, the children brought in barefoot and naked were driven to a half-kilometer barrack, where they had to wash in ice water.

After that, the children were driven to the next building in the same way, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. At the same time, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. All who survived after this procedure were also subjected to arsenic etching. Infants were kept separately, injections were given to them, from which the child died in agony in a few days.

They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children per day died from the experiments. The bodies of the dead were taken out in large baskets and burned, thrown into cesspools or buried near the camp.

If we start listing the women's concentration camps of the Nazis, then Ravensbrück will be in the first place. It was the only camp of this type in Germany. It held thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war was overcrowded by fifteen thousand.

Mostly Russian and Polish women were kept, Jews accounted for about 15 percent. There were no written instructions regarding torture and torture; the overseers chose the line of conduct themselves. Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number.

Also, the clothes indicated racial affiliation. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) about three hundred prisoners were kept, who were placed on three-story bunks.

When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were driven into these cells, who had to sleep seven of them on the same bunk. There were several toilets and a washbasin in the barracks, but there were so few of them that the floors were littered with excrement after a few days. Such a picture was presented by almost all Nazi concentration camps (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and hardy, fit for work, were left, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops. Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps.

Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared already at the end of the war. The ashes from the crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer. The prisoners worked at least 12 hours a day.

In a special barracks called the "infirmary", German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling the test subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered for the rest of their lives from what they suffered. Experiments were also conducted with the irradiation of women with X-rays, from which hair fell out, skin was pigmented, and death occurred.

Genital organs were cut out, after which few survived, and even those quickly grew old, and at 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out by all Nazi concentration camps, the torture of women and children is the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there, the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks for the settlement of refugees.

Later, Ravensbrück turned into a stationing point for Soviet military units.

The construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, who became the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the "hellish" concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately outside the gates began "Appelplat" (parade ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite was the office, where the lagerfuhrer and the officer on duty lived - the camp authorities.

Deeper were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were arranged in the rest. The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory, their names still cause fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald.

The crematorium was considered the scariest place.

People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot, and the body was sent to the oven. Only men were kept in Buchenwald.

Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn in the first day. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp. Continuing to describe the concentration camps of the Nazis, let us turn to the so-called "small camp" of Buchenwald.

Small camp Buchenwald "Small camp" was called the quarantine zone. Living conditions here were, even in comparison with the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when the German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiègne camp were brought to this camp, mostly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were placed in tents.

The closer 1945 was, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the "small camp" included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in the concentration camps of the Nazis was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, the very life in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks, their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread, the unemployed were no longer supposed to. Relations among the prisoners were tough, documented cases of cannibalism, murder for someone else's portion of bread.

It was a common practice to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The clothes of the deceased were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only exacerbated the situation, as injection syringes were not changed. The photo is simply not able to convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. Witness accounts are not for the faint of heart.

In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to take a step forward - there were not so many experimental people in any country in the world.

Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, those inhuman sufferings that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated and organs were cut out, sterilized, castrated. They tested how long a person is able to withstand extreme cold or heat. Specially infected with diseases, introduced experimental drugs.

So, in Buchenwald, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed. In addition to typhoid, the prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid. Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the "Buchenwald witch" for her love of sadism and inhuman abuse of prisoners. She was more feared than her husband (Karl Koch) and the Nazi doctors.

She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshade". The woman owes this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of the killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945 by the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and ran the camp for two days until the American soldiers approached.

Listing the concentration camps of the Nazis, Auschwitz cannot be ignored. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died.

The exact details of the dead have not yet been clarified. Most of the victims were Jewish prisoners of war, who were destroyed immediately upon arrival in the gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name has become a household name. Above the camp gates were engraved the following words: "Work sets you free."

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

1. Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
2. Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called the death camp;
3. Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived in the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately.

Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. So, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. Gas "Cyclone B" was used. For the first time, the terrible invention was tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners with a total number of about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments began on women and men for sterilization and castration. Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners were kept working in factories and mines.

One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. About ten thousand prisoners were kept here. Like any Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were forbidden, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

On the territory of Auschwitz, five crematoria were continuously operating, which, according to experts, had a monthly output of approximately 270,000 corpses. On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was liberated by Soviet troops.

By that time, about seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year before that, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and a memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

For the entire duration of the war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. They were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It's hard to imagine what these people went through. But not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps was destined to be demolished by them.

Thanks to Stalin, after their release, when they returned home, they received the stigma of "traitors". At home, the Gulag was waiting for them, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity was replaced by another for them.

In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences. Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after their release was not advertised and hushed up. But the people who survived this simply should not be forgotten.

The dirty secret of the Nazi camps

Nazi atrocities continue to amaze modern people with their brutality. Not so long ago, another fact was discovered that made even the worldly-wise researchers of that terrible time shudder. Unfortunately or fortunately, you will never find such information in history books...

The highest German officials during the Second World War crossed all boundaries in satisfying their secret crazy desires. To amuse their ego, and at the same time to curry favor with the Fuhrer, during the heyday of the concentration camps, they came up with a special "trick".

To implement what was conceived, a couple of Jews were brought to the house or office of a high-ranking Nazi. These could be especially "dangerous" prisoners, or those who found the strength to resist the system. Of course, these were prisoners of concentration camps, most often Auschwitz was “gotten”.

Prisoners were stripped naked and tied by the arms and legs to a urinal. In such a situation, the poor Jew had nowhere to go: the ropes rudely dug into the skin, and it was possible to freely move only the head. A high-ranking Nazi... was urinating on a tied prisoner. In fact, he used it as a toilet bowl. Often the Nazis extinguished cigarette butts on the bodies of "living drains."

It was considered a special chic to demonstrate such a toilet to your “comrades”. And here the real hell began for the unfortunate. Each guest intended to "leave his mark" on the body of the "home Jew".

Such a "toilet" could serve for a long time - a month, or even two. Until he died in terrible agony from exhaustion ...

The Nazis forced female prisoners into prostitution

Only recently, researchers found that in a dozen European concentration camps, the Nazis forced female prisoners to engage in prostitution in special brothels, writes Vladimir Ginda in the column Archive in issue 31 of the magazine Correspondent dated August 9, 2013.

Torment and death or prostitution - before such a choice, the Nazis put Europeans and Slavs who ended up in concentration camps. Of the few hundred girls who chose the second option, the administration staffed brothels in ten camps - not only in those where prisoners were used as labor, but also in others aimed at mass destruction.

In Soviet and modern European historiography, this topic did not actually exist, only a couple of American scientists - Wendy Gertjensen and Jessica Hughes - raised some aspects of the problem in their scientific works.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the German culturologist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the German culturologist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about the sexual conveyors that operated in the horrendous conditions of German concentration camps and death factories.

The result of nine years of research was the book published by Sommer in 2009 Brothel in a concentration camp which shocked European readers. On the basis of this work, an exhibition was organized in Berlin, Sex Work in Concentration Camps.

Bed motivation

“Legalized sex” appeared in Nazi concentration camps in 1942. The SS men organized brothels in ten institutions, among which were mainly the so-called labor camps - in the Austrian Mauthausen and its branch Gusen, the German Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen and Dora-Mittelbau.

In addition, the institute of forced prostitutes was also introduced in three death camps intended for the extermination of prisoners: in the Polish Auschwitz-Auschwitz and its “satellite” Monowitz, as well as in the German Dachau.

The idea of ​​creating camp brothels belonged to the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The researchers' data suggests that he was impressed by the incentive system used in Soviet forced labor camps to increase inmate productivity.

Himmler decided to learn from the experience, along the way adding to the list of "incentives" what was not in the Soviet system - "encouraging" prostitution. The SS chief was convinced that the right to visit a brothel, along with other bonuses - cigarettes, cash or camp vouchers, improved rations - could make the prisoners work harder and better.

In fact, the right to visit such establishments was predominantly held by camp guards from among the prisoners. And there is a logical explanation for this: most of the male prisoners were exhausted, so they did not think about any sexual attraction.

Hughes points out that the proportion of male prisoners who used the services of brothels was extremely small. In Buchenwald, according to her data, where about 12.5 thousand people were kept in September 1943, 0.77% of prisoners visited the public barracks in three months. A similar situation was in Dachau, where, as of September 1944, 0.75% of the 22 thousand prisoners who were there used the services of prostitutes.

heavy share

At the same time, up to two hundred sex slaves worked in brothels. Most of the women, two dozen, were kept in a brothel in Auschwitz.

Brothel workers were exclusively female prisoners, usually attractive, between the ages of 17 and 35. About 60-70% of them were of German origin, from among those whom the Reich authorities called "anti-social elements."

Some were engaged in prostitution before entering the concentration camps, so they agreed to similar work, but already behind barbed wire, without any problems and even passed on their skills to inexperienced colleagues.

Approximately a third of the sex slaves the SS recruited from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians. Jewish women were not allowed to do such work, and Jewish prisoners were not allowed to visit brothels.

These workers wore special insignia - black triangles sewn on the sleeves of their robes.

About a third of the sex slaves the SS recruited from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians

Some of the girls voluntarily agreed to “work”. So, one former employee of the medical unit of Ravensbrück, the largest female concentration camp in the Third Reich, where up to 130 thousand people were kept, recalled: some women voluntarily went to a brothel because they were promised release after six months of work.

Spaniard Lola Casadel, a member of the Resistance movement, who ended up in the same camp in 1944, told how the headman of their barracks announced: “Whoever wants to work in a brothel, come to me. And remember: if there are no volunteers, we will have to resort to force.”

The threat was not empty: as Sheina Epshtein, a Jewish woman from the Kaunas ghetto, recalled, in the camp the inhabitants of the women's barracks lived in constant fear of the guards, who regularly raped the prisoners. The raids were made at night: drunken men walked along the bunks with flashlights, choosing the most beautiful victim.

“Their joy knew no bounds when they discovered that the girl was a virgin. Then they laughed out loud and called their colleagues,” Epstein said.

Having lost honor, and even the will to fight, some girls went to brothels, realizing that this was their last hope for survival.

“The most important thing is that we managed to escape from [the camps] Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück,” Liselotte B., a former prisoner at the Dora-Mittelbau camp, said of her “bed career”. “The main thing was to somehow survive.”

With Aryan meticulousness

After the initial selection, the workers were brought to special barracks in those concentration camps where they were planned to be used. To bring the emaciated prisoners into a more or less decent appearance, they were placed in the infirmary. There, paramedics in SS uniform gave them calcium injections, they took disinfectant baths, ate, and even sunbathed under quartz lamps.

There was no sympathy in all this, but only calculation: the bodies were prepared for hard work. As soon as the rehabilitation cycle ended, the girls became part of the sex assembly line. Work was daily, rest - only if there was no light or water, if an air raid alert was announced, or during the broadcast of speeches by the German leader Adolf Hitler on the radio.

The conveyor worked like clockwork and strictly on schedule. For example, in Buchenwald, prostitutes got up at 7:00 and took care of themselves until 19:00: they had breakfast, did exercises, underwent daily medical examinations, washed and cleaned, and dined. By camp standards, there was so much food that prostitutes even exchanged food for clothes and other things. Everything ended with dinner, and from seven in the evening the two-hour work began. Camp prostitutes could not go out to see her only if they had “these days” or they fell ill.

The very procedure for providing intimate services, starting from the selection of men, was as detailed as possible. Mostly the so-called camp functionaries could get a woman - internees who were engaged in internal security and guards from among the prisoners.

Moreover, at first the doors of brothels were opened exclusively to the Germans or representatives of the peoples living on the territory of the Reich, as well as to the Spaniards and Czechs. Later, the circle of visitors was expanded - only Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and ordinary internees were excluded from it. For example, visit logs of a brothel in Mauthausen, meticulously kept by administration officials, show that 60% of the clients were criminals.

Men who wanted to indulge in carnal pleasures first had to get permission from the camp leadership. After that, they bought an entrance ticket for two Reichsmarks - this is slightly less than the cost of 20 cigarettes sold in the dining room. Of this amount, a quarter went to the woman herself, and only if she was German.

In the camp brothel, clients, first of all, found themselves in the waiting room, where their data was verified. Then they underwent a medical examination and received prophylactic injections. Next, the visitor was told the number of the room where he should go. There the intercourse took place. Only the “missionary position” was allowed. Conversations were not welcome.

Here is how one of the “concubines” kept there, Magdalena Walter, describes the work of a brothel in Buchenwald: “We had one bathroom with a toilet, where women went to wash themselves before the next visitor arrived. Immediately after washing, the client appeared. Everything worked like a conveyor; men were not allowed to stay in the room for more than 15 minutes.”

During the evening, the prostitute, according to the surviving documents, took 6-15 people.

body in action

Legalized prostitution was beneficial to the authorities. So, in Buchenwald alone, in the first six months of operation, the brothel earned 14-19 thousand Reichsmarks. The money went to the account of the German Economic Policy Department.

The Germans used women not only as an object of sexual pleasure, but also as scientific material. The inhabitants of the brothels carefully monitored hygiene, because any venereal disease could cost them their lives: infected prostitutes in the camps were not treated, but experiments were performed on them.

The scientists of the Reich did this, fulfilling the will of Hitler: even before the war, he called syphilis one of the most dangerous diseases in Europe, capable of leading to disaster. The Fuhrer believed that only those peoples who would find a way to quickly cure the disease would be saved. For the sake of obtaining a miracle cure, the SS men turned infected women into living laboratories. However, they did not stay alive for long - intensive experiments quickly led the prisoners to a painful death.

Researchers have found a number of cases where even healthy prostitutes were given to be torn to pieces by sadistic doctors.

Pregnant women were not spared in the camps either. In some places they were immediately killed, in some places they were artificially interrupted, and after five weeks they were again sent “into service”. Moreover, abortions were performed at different times and in different ways - and this also became part of the research. Some prisoners were allowed to give birth, but only in order to experimentally determine how long a baby could live without food.

Despicable Prisoners

According to the former prisoner of Buchenwald, Dutchman Albert van Dijk, other prisoners despised the camp prostitutes, not paying attention to the fact that they were forced to go “on the panel” by cruel conditions of detention and an attempt to save their lives. And the very work of the inhabitants of brothels was akin to daily repeated rape.

Some of the women, even being in a brothel, tried to defend their honor. For example, Walter came to Buchenwald as a virgin and, being in the role of a prostitute, tried to protect herself from the first client with scissors.

The attempt failed, and, according to the records, on the same day, the former virgin satisfied six men. Walter endured this because she knew that otherwise she would face a gas chamber, a crematorium or a barracks for cruel experiments.

Not everyone was strong enough to survive the violence. Some of the inhabitants of the camp brothels, according to researchers, took their own lives, some lost their minds. Some survived, but remained a prisoner of psychological problems for life.

Physical liberation did not relieve them of the burden of the past, and after the war, camp prostitutes were forced to hide their history. Therefore, scientists have collected little documented evidence of life in these brothels.

"It's one thing to say 'I worked as a carpenter' or 'I built roads' and quite another to say 'I was forced to work as a prostitute,'" says Inza Eshebach, head of the memorial at the former Ravensbrück camp.