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Paige Stillwell
Modern World History-P, Period 2
Mr. Hawkins
8 April 2016
The First Concentration Camps: 1933-1939
Established in March 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was the first regular
concentration camp established by the Nazi government. It was a place of imprisonment and
torture. These concentration camps were used during the holocaust and basically left the Jewish
people to die in them.
The first concentration camps held 5,000 people. The number of people in camps,
which had fallen to 7,500, grew again to 21,000 by the start of World War II and peaked at
715,000 in January 1945 (Nazi Concentration Camps). This was a place where prisoners
were starved, often tortured and worked to death. The administrators of the camps were careless.
Conditions inside the camps were appalling, and starvation and diseases were very real
dangers (Nazi Camps) All the diseases were apparent. Diseases included tuberculosis and
many other harmful sicknesses. Prisoners also had mental conditions such as severe depression,
panic, and delusional disorders. More than 3.5 million Germans were forced into
concentration camps and merely 77,000 people were executed (Nazi concentration camps).
The Germans were forced into the camps for political reasons determined by the government and
the people were executed for one or another form of resistance by the special courts.

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The power the Nazis had over the Germans was unthinkable. From its rise to power in
1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate socalled "enemies of the state (Nazi Camps). People contained in these camps were German
Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals,
and persons accused of socially deviant behavior. The Nazis discriminated against these people.
Jehovah's Witnesses were the only "voluntary victims" of Nazism (Nazi Camps). They
refused to register in the Wehrmacht or to swear allegiance to the state. The words "Heil Hitler"
never passed their lips because they knew what the stood for and didnt let their guard down.
By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, unleashing World
War II, there were six concentration camps (Concentration Camps). These camps held at
least 5,000 people each. And almost all of those people died of something. Likewise,
concentration camp authorities increasingly diverted prisoners from meaningless,
backbreaking labor (Concentration Camps). They instead change it to still backbreaking and
dangerous labor in extractive industries, such as stone quarries and coal mines, and construction
labor. The Nazis had no regard for the people held in the camps whatsoever. The concentration
camps increasingly became sites where the SS authorities could kill targeted groups of real or
perceived enemies of Nazi Germany (Concentration Camps). Theses authorities did what ever
they wanted and killed whoever they though necessary.

All in all concentration camps werent a good thing at all. All the Nazis for it but the
people in the camps were severely ill and ill treated. It was not the place anyone wanted to be at
in the 1930s. Millions of people were held in concentration camps and murdered, and more

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than three million Jews were killed in the killing centers alone. Only a small part of those people
in the camps didnt die.