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Michael Penny
Mr. Hawkins
World History-P, Period 4
10 April, 2016
Expansion of the Concentration Camp System
The concentration camps were originally intended to only hold what the Nazis considered
to be threats against their political campaign. Over time, as the Nazis grew and gained more
power, though, they began becoming more confident in who they locked away for what reason.
Most of the time, it was for no reason at all, and they were people that the public wouldnt miss
or sometimes even notice were missing. The expansion of the concentration camp was fairly
gradual and at a somewhat reasonable rate, so that the public would not object to it.
To start off, the concentration camps were only originally meant to keep political
prisoners. For example, the German authorities under National Socialism established a
variety of detention facilities to confine those whom they defined as political, ideological, or
racial opponents of the regime (Website 1). They werent even called concentration camps to
begin with, but the term originated from the idea of concentrating a group of undesirable
people in one place legally. This is what they were meant for, of course, but they were only for
the people that Nazis considered threatening to the movement. The first internment camp which
opened in Dachau in 1993 focused on political prisonerscommunists, social democrats,
and dissidents who posed a threat to the new regime and were unpopular with most other
Germans (Website #2). No one would object to someone going missing who they didnt like,
so the original targets for arresting and abducting were exactly that the individuals who

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wouldnt be missed. This was smart because it not only gave the Nazis the means to take people
away, but it allowed them to let the common people think that they were on their side. The Nazis
basically advertised for their camp in the way of newspapers: Almost every community in
Germany had members taken [to Dachau]. The newspapers continuously reported of the
removal of the enemies of the Reich to concentration camps making the general population
more aware of their presence (Website 3). This was basically a dare by the Nazis, saying to
the people that if they tried to challenge the authority or complain that they would be taken there
too. No one objected to it, though, because of their fears. This was what the camps were
originally designed for, but what they evolved into was a completely different story.
When the concentration camps began to become more serious, it was much more
alarming what they did. Even before the war started, people were targeted for arresting and
placed in the concentration camps: Mass attacks on Nazi targets that included widely
respected members of German society did not start until 1938, five years after Hitler was
named chancellor (Website 2). This is when the Nazi police and not-so-secret forces began
becoming more confident because they essentially had complete control of the government by
this time. This meant that they could arrest basically whoever they wanted whenever they
wanted. After the war started in 1939, concentration camps became places where millions of
ordinary people were enslaved as part of the war effort, often starved, tortured and killed
(Website 3). While the concentration camps only became a place for people to be arrested and
then tortured AFTER the war started, the conditions were terrible before this too. These camps
werent only for extermination, though, because that came later these camps just hard terrible
conditions that people starved to death in and were tortured by the constant forced labor. This is
when people began to fear for their safety even if they hadnt done anything wrong because

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individuals could be incarcerated in concentration camps indefinitely without ever being

charged for a specific act or because the SS and police authorities deemed that
individualoften on the basis of alleged racial inferiority or alleged racially driven
hostility to Germany was a danger to German society (Website 1). People could be
arrested for pretty much no reason, and there was nothing their families or friends could do about
it. The people that were mostly arrested were minorities, political enemies of the Nazi parties, or
people deemed unfit for life. This was what the concentration camp evolved into, but this
wasnt even the worst stage of it yet.
The most widely-known phase of concentration camps is the part where they became
extermination camps. This is obviously the most horrifying part, yet it only happened 3 years
after the war started: In 1942, the SS built a network of extermination camps to
systematically kill millions of prisoners by gassing (Website 3). This is when they began
slaughtering millions of people just because of the way they were or even who they were. The
extermination camps were set up to only have people sent there and killed primarily by gassing,
sometimes by exhausting the inmates to death under starvation. The primary target of the
extermination camps were Jews: [They] were murdered upon arrival in the gas chambers at
the killing centers, were never officially registered as prisoners, but were killed usually
within 24 hours of arrival (Website 1). Originally, the camps werent equipped with
something efficient enough to kill prisoners at a fast rate, so the SS began equipping every one of
the camps with gas chambers to make sure that any Jewish prisoners could be exterminated upon
arrival. They also needed the chambers to make sure that they would always have enough room
for the people that were fit to work, and those who werent were executed. And, depending on
the point of view one has, this might be the worst part, towards the end of the war, The camps

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became sites for medical experiments. Eugenics experiments, freezing prisoners to

determine how downed pilots were affected by exposure, and experimental and lethal
medicines were all tried at various camps (Website 3). This is probably the worst stage in the
development of the concentration camps, since most of the time the experiments were worse than
death. This was the final and arguably most gruesome phase of the evolution of concentration
camps. This was a terrible and grisly phase in the stages of the concentration camp, but the whole
thing was pretty bad too.
The expansion of concentration camps was gradual and escalated over a period of
time. The whole concentration camp system was terrible and horrific, but they only started out as
a site for political prisoners to be held. They then escalated into the camps where anyone could
be take, and then after that the execution and medical experimentation camps. They were all
horrible, but in the end, it can be avoided now.