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The Round Tablette February 2007 Volume 15 Number 6 Published by WW II History Roundtable Edited by Jim Gerber Welcome to the February meeting of the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Roundtable. Tonight’s program is on the Nazis Concentration Camps, the victims and the liberators. Our presenter is author and Roundtable board member Steve Chicoine. The Nazis Camp System Originally, the Nazis Camp System began as a system of repression mainly against political opponents of the Nazis State. In the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazis imprisoned primarily Communists and Socialists. About 1935, the regime also began to imprison those whom it designated as racially or biologically inferior, especially Jews. As WW II progressed, the organization and scale of the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly and the purpose of the camps went beyond imprisonment toward forced labor and outright murder. Throughout German occupied Europe, the Germans arrested those who resisted their domination and those they judged to be racially inferior or politically unacceptable. People arrested for resisting German rule were sent mostly to forced labor or concentration camps. The populations of the camps came to include prisoners from almost every European nation. Prisoners in all the concentration camps were literally worked to death. According to SS reports, there were more than 700,000 prisoners registered n the concentration camps in January 1945. Concentration Camps 1933 – 1939 The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment. The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. The SA and the police organized camps beginning in February 1933. Camps were set up by local authorities as needed to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged political opponents of the regime throughout Germany. Gradually, the Nazis disbanded most of these early camps and replaced them with centrally organized concentration camps under the exclusive jurisdiction of the SS. Dachau, the only concentration camp opened in 1933 that remained in operation until 1945, was the model for the Nazi concentration camp system that replaced the earlier camps. By 1939, six large camps had been established. Besides Dachau, they were Sachenhausen, Buchenward, Flossenbuerg, Mauthausen and Ravensbrueck. After 1939, the concentration camp system expanded to the east due to new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners. With the beginning of the war, the camps, increasingly, became sites where targeted groups of real or perceived enemies of the Nazis were either murdered outright or put to hard, meaningless labor. They were annihilated by labor. Concentration Camps, 1939 – 1942 The years 1939 – 1942 saw a marked expansion in the camp system. In 1938, the SS began to exploit the labor of the camp prisoners for economic profit. The war provided a convenient excuse to ban releases from the camps, thus providing the SS with a readily available labor force. The SS established new camps in the vicinity of factories or sites of extraction of raw materials. The goods extracted or produced by prisoner labor were sold to the German Reich through SS-owned firms such as the German Earth and Stone Works. As Germany continued to conquer more of Europe, the SS established a number of new concentration camps to incarcerate increased numbers of political prisoners, resistance groups and groups considered racially inferior such as Jews and Gypsies. Among these new camps were: Gusen, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, Natzweiler, Stuttfof and Majdanek. The camps became sites of mass murder of targeted groups deemed dangerous for political or racial reasons. Captured members of national resistance movements were sent to concentration camps to be murdered upon arrival. Concentration Camps, 1942 – 1945 After the defeat of the German Army in its attempt to take Moscow and the entry of the US into the War, the Germans understood that Germany would have to fight a long war. Responding to the increasingly acute labor shortages and the need to produce more implements of war, the SS established more SS-owned firms. It also signed contracts with state and private firms to produce goods and provide labor for the German armaments and related industries. A famous example of cooperation between the SS and private industry was the I.G. Farben company’s establishment of a synthetic rubber plant in 1942 at Auschwitz III(Monowitz). The incarceration of increasing numbers of people in the concentration camps assured at least the quantity of the labor supply even as the brutality of the regimen inside the camps depleted the number of available laborers. The SS used gas chambers and other means to “weed out” prisoners who were no longer able to work. During the last year of the war the camp population suffered catastrophic losses due to starvation, exposure, disease and mistreatment. The SS also evacuated the prisoners because the Nazis did not want the prisoners to be liberated. During this period, the camps were also sites of hideous and perverted medical experiments conducted on prisoners against their will and often with lethal results. In 1944 – 1945, the Allied armies liberated the concentration camps. Tragically, deaths in the camps continued for several weeks after liberation. Some prisoners had already become too weak to survive. It is estimated that more than half of total number of concentration camp deaths between 1933 and 1945 occurred during the last year of the war. More reading on tonight’s topic: An Unbroken Chain By Henry A. Oertelt Lerner Publications Minneapolis, Mn. 2000 On sale tonight Witnesses to the Holocaust By Rhoda G. Lewin Twain Publishers Boston, Mass. 1990 Witness to Barbarism By Horace R. Hansen Thousand Pinetree Press St. Paul, Mn 2002 On Sale Tonight Auschwitz By Laurence Rees Public Affairs Press New York, New York 2005 Walking With The Damned By Ted Schwarz Paragon House New York, New York 1992 When the Warflowers Bloomed By Calvin Vraa Authorhouse Minneapolis, MN 2004 Historical novel on sale tonight; Author is available for signing