Concentration Camp Prisoners

The Nazi project to transform Germany to fit Nazi ideas about race and national unity excluded many groups of people. Nazi policies targeted a wide range of these people as “enemies of the state” and imprisoned them in concentration camps away from the rest of society. Sources in this collection explore the different experiences of people imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.

Concentration Camp Prisoners

During the years of Nazi rule, German authorities imprisoned a variety of different people in concentration camps—detention sites under Nazi control where people were imprisoned without the protections of the German legal system.¹ Nazi ideology labeled many different Germans as “internal enemies” who threatened the Nazis’ vision for a racially and politically unified “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”).² These groups included Jewish people as well as Roma and Sinti,³ political opponents of the Nazis, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men and others suspected of same-sex relationships, people designated as “habitual criminals,” and several others. Nazi authorities used concentration camps to imprison people and keep them away from the so-called “national community.” The Nazis used these camps to intimidate the entire population with the threat of imprisonment and abuse.

The Nazi regime established the first concentration camps shortly after rising to power in early 1933.⁴ They quickly became known as places of violence and terror. People were often imprisoned indefinitely. Many were abused, tortured, or murdered by Nazi guards. This letter written by a Jehovah’s Witness describes some of the abuse prisoners received from guards. The death certificate of Friedrich Dressel documents one of the first prisoner deaths at Dachau concentration camp. Dachau and other early camps were used primarily to imprison the Nazis’ political opponents, part of the Nazis’ broader effort to ban all other political parties and to change Germany from a democracy into a one-party state. The Nazis mainly targeted Communists, Socialists, and other leftwing political opponents at this time.

In the mid-1930s, the concentration camp prisoner population began to change. German authorities began to imprison more people for not conforming to Nazi social expectations. Groups targeted as social outsiders included gay men and others persecuted for reasons of sexuality or gender. Those arrested for alleged violations of German laws regulating things such as vagrancy or sex work were also targeted.⁵ Many people—including Roma and Sinti—were held without trial for being classified as “asocial."⁶

Beginning in 1938, authorities began systematically imprisoning Jewish people.⁷ Some Jewish people had been imprisoned in concentration camps already. They were often singled out and abused by camp guards. Most Jews arrested before 1938 had supposedly been targeted solely as political opponents or social outsiders—Jews imprisoned after 1938 were typically targeted as so-called racial outsiders.⁸

The concentration camp population grew dramatically during World War II, as did the entire universe of German-run camps. Many non-Germans from territories occupied by German forces were imprisoned in the camps. Nazi leaders struggled to meet labor shortages as the war turned against Germany. They increasingly exploited the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners to help the German war economy. Subcamps were established directly at sites of forced labor in the early 1940s. As German forces suffered losses and reversals, they evacuated concentration camp prisoners in forced marches to camps in the German interior. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died of starvation, disease, and abuse during the final stages of the war.⁹

The Nazi SS and other camp guards systematically dehumanized concentration camp prisoners.¹⁰ They forced them to wear striped uniforms, like the camp prisoner uniform of William Luksenburg. They also made prisoners wear badges with identification numbers and symbols made of colored triangles, such as this prisoner badge worn by Josef Kohout. Captured in this chart of prisoner markings, these symbols reflected the different prisoner categories created by Nazi authorities. These categories of exclusion greatly impacted how prisoners were treated, and often determined their chances for survival. For example, Jewish prisoners often faced particularly bad conditions. They were frequently singled out for physical abuse by SS guards. On the other hand, so-called “Aryan” prisoners categorized as “habitual criminals” were often selected for positions of relative privilege and authority in the camps.

Concentration camp prisoners’ experiences often differed according to their categorization under Nazi ideology, but many people shared similar struggles. Most prisoners faced overcrowded conditions, hunger, disease, and forced labor. A photograph of Romani female survivors after liberation at Bergen-Belsen gives a glimpse into the unsanitary, overcrowded conditions in which most camp prisoners were often forced to live. Experiences of forced labor in the camps could vary widely as well.¹¹ A leather bouquet of flowers made in Bergen-Belsen and oral histories with Ester Grun and Ron Jones show how gender, nationality, and background could determine the kinds of labor individual prisoners were made to carry out.

Prisoners faced terrible conditions regardless of their sex, gender, or age, but there were some concentration camp experiences that were specifically gendered. For example, an oral history with Blanka Rothschild shows how sexual violence and humiliation were used to terrorize female prisoners in concentration camps. A Christmas card given to Polish political prisoner Jadwiga Dzido shows how female prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp who became the subjects of unethical medical experiments formed networks of support with one another.

Concentration camp prisoners of all backgrounds often sought to forge communities during their imprisonment. Some prisoners found creative ways to help one another, as shown by a postcard sent by Josep Miret Musté from Mauthausen concentration camp. Many prisoners also found support in their religious communities—a Passover prayer from Bergen-Belsen shows how some Jewish prisoners adjusted to the extreme circumstances of life in the camps together. Communal bonds and connections among prisoners could mean the difference between life and death. This tin pail made for Shmuel Rabinovitz shows how such relationships could help young prisoners survive. Klara Samuels' diary from Bergen-Belsen illustrates how some prisoners found comfort in friendship and even romance as they faced the terrible uncertainties of life in concentration camps.

Nazi propaganda described concentration camps as sites where “a handful of men protect Germany from its internal enemies.” These so-called “enemies” included a wide range of people identified as political, social, or racial “outsiders” who supposedly threatened the Nazis’ “national community.” Sources in this collection show how—in an environment of terror, violence, and abuse—prisoners’ experiences could differ widely. Categories assigned to prisoners by Nazi authorities shaped their day-to-day lives and influenced their chances for survival.

The Nazi camp system grew over time to include a vast network of concentration camps, prisons, forced labor camps, transit camps, prisoner of war (POW) camps, ghettos, and killing centers. These categories often blurred or overlapped, and many sites served multiple purposes and changed over time. This collection of primary sources focuses on the experiences of people imprisoned in detention sites under the control of the Nazi paramilitary SS (Schutzstaffel).

To see other documents and media about the formation of the Nazis' so-called "national community," please visit the related Experiencing History collection, Nazi Propaganda and National Unity. To learn more about the meanings of belonging and membership in the Nazi "national community," see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003); and Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Roma are a diverse European ethnic group who can trace their ancestry to modern-day India and Pakistan many hundreds of years ago. There are many groups of Romani people with their own distinct cultural identities, such as Sinti, Lovari, Kalderashi, or Lalleri. Sinti are a large, culturally distinct Romani group that has lived in Central Europe since the Middle Ages. Most Romani people living in Germany in the early 20th century were Sinti.

Romani people have often been referred to by negative labels. In English, this word is “Gypsy.” Most Romani people have long considered such terms insulting, and today these words are generally considered racial or ethnic slurs. These labels have also been used at times to include non-Romani people with trades or lifestyles typically associated with Roma. To learn more, see the Experiencing History collection, Roma and Sinti in Nazi Germany.

Some scholars argue that the improvised camps established in 1933 should be considered "early camps" rather than "concentration camps," because the latter phrase suggests the more rigidly organized concentration camp system that emerged under the Nazi SS after 1933. To learn more about the early camps under Nazi rule and the development of the Nazi camp system, see "Introduction to the Early Camps," in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), edited by Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington and Washington, DC: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 3–16.

To learn more, see Victoria Harris, "The Role of the Concentration Camps in the Nazi Repression of Prostitutes, 1933-1939," Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (July 2010), 675–698.

"Asocial" (German: "Asozial") was an extremely flexible category that could be applied broadly to many people who were deemed to be social outsiders threatening the Nazis’ vision for Germany.

Authorities arrested many Jewish people following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 and the coordinated pogroms of November 1938 known as Kristallnacht.

To learn more, see Kim Wünschmann, "Cementing the Enemy Category: Arrest and Imprisonment of German Jews in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-8/9," Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (July 2010), 576–600.

To learn more, see The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators, edited by Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987).

The Nazi paramilitary SS (Schutzstaffel) first took control of the concentration camp system during the early years of Nazi rule. To learn more about the development of the Nazi concentration camp system in the 1930s, see Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann, "Before Auschwitz: The Formation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-9," Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (July 2010), 515–534.

For more sources on the experiences of forced laborers under Nazism, see the related collection in Experiencing History.

All 16 Items in the Concentration Camp Prisoners Collection