The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps

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Table of Contents

The Early Years: Suppression of Political Opposition
The War Years
Liberation and the Toll of Those for Whom It Came Too Late
Works Cited

The Early Years: Suppression of Political Opposition

The chain of Nazi concentration camps started the same year Adolf Hitler ascended to power as Chancellor of Germany, even before the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria. From 1933 onward, the Nazi regime’s Storm Troopers and local police had to establish camps in virtually all communities as they ran out of jail space to confine the multitudes of political opponents and “deviants” the government wanted out of the way. Beginning in 1936, these were concentrated into larger establishments under the control of the elite Schutzstaffel (SS) command (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d., para 1). By 1939, seven had been established: Sachsenhausen (1936, near Berlin), Buchenwald (1937, close to Weimar), Neuengamme (1938, around Hamburg, Flossenbuerg (1938), Mauthausen (1938, near Linz in Austria), and Ravensbruck (1939), the women’s camp. Most camp inmates were put to work in stone quarries, other extractive industries, and in SS-owned factories

The War Years

With the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the rest of Europe soon after, the opportunity came to establish new camps in the conquered territories. These were needed to house newly-designated “undesirables” such as Jews and Gypsies who could then be put to work in war materiel factories while being systematically starved to death. Resistance leaders apprehended by the Gestapo were also sent there for annihilation. And to cope with the large headcounts of those condemned to death, gas chambers were constructed in Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz I, Treblinka, Dachau, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmo, mostly in occupied Poland (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009, para. 5; Florida Center for Instructional Technology 1).

Liberation and the Toll of Those for Whom It Came Too Late

Just before Christmas of 1944, the American Seventh and First French Armies pushed into Strasbourg and found the first of many horrors, the Natwiller-Struthof labor camp (Abzug 3-4). Originally established to put German political opponents to work the nearby granite quarries, Natwiller had by 1943 started to house Jews and Gypsies slated for extermination, as well as captured resistance fighters from nearby France, Holland, and Belgium. In addition, University of Strasburg scientists performed live experiments to test the effects of mustard gas, inoculation with typhus, and forced jaundice. For the thousands who had died here, rescue came 60 days too late because the SS had evacuated the camp right after the Battle of the Bulge. It was too late for the blight on America’s conscience because Abzug related, CBS had reported the Nazi intent to “wipe the Jews from the face of the earth” (p. 4) as early as 1940 before the United States and Germany declared war on each other.

To the East, the story was even more horrifying. Soviet troops pushing German troops back through the Ukraine and Poland to the Vaterland of the “Greater German Reich” discovered Majdanek near Lublin, with all inmates already exterminated, in the late summer of 1944. In January of 1945, Soviet troops reached Auschwitz, the site of 48 camps near the southwest border of Poland and Czechoslovakia. By official estimates, 1.1 million Jews had perished here, as had 150,000 Poles, 23,000 gypsies, 15,000 Russian POWs, and tens of thousands more of different nationalities. They had died in the infamous gas chambers, dropped dead of exhaustion and starvation, lack of attention, horrifying executions, and medical experiments (Caplan 62, 88).

Works Cited

Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press. 1987.

Caplan, Richelle B. (ed.) Our Memory of the Past and for the Future. Proceedings of an International Forum in Jerusalem, Israel. 2003.

Florida Center for Instructional Technology. “Map of Nazi Camp System.” 2005. A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust, College of Education, University of South Florida. Web.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Holocaust Encyclopedia.” 2009. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Concentration Camps, 1939-1942.” n.d. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web.

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The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps

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