Concentration Camp Construction

The average camp had about 24 buildings, including kitchen, mess hall, barracks and quarters for the officers. Many camps began as tent cities until the permanent camp could be built.

The first concentration camp was created in 1933, just a few weeks after Hitler became chancellor. A total of twenty-two were created, and all together included 1,200 affiliated camps. The camps were found all over Germany. At first political opponents of Nazi policy were taken, and later Jews, gypsies, or criminals. Each camp consisted of barracks which were surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and guards. Imprisonment in the camp included inhuman force labor, hunger, disease, mistreatment, and random executions. Prisoners were forced to work twelve hours day, or even more. The sick, old or those who could not keep up were killed by either gas, or injections. Those who could endure

Of all of the death camps built by the Nazis during World War II, none was larger or more destructive than the terrifying Auschwitz camp. Auschwitz was built by the Nazis in 1940, in Oswiecim, Poland, and was composed of three main parts. Auschwitz I was built in June 1940 and was intended to hold and kill Polish political prisoners. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which opened October 1941, was larger and could contain over 100,000 inmates. Auschwitz III-Monowitz provided slave labor for a plant close by. In addition, there were many sub-camps. The most important camp at Auschwitz designed for the extermination of many people was Birkenau; numerous gas chambers and crematoria were established there, mainly to murder and incinerate Jews as

Concentration camps came a long way from 1933 to 1945. The purpose of concentration camps was slightly different in the beginning than they were at the end. Concentration camps were originally set up in Germany to punish anyone who disagreed with the Nazis(The Holocaust Explained Staff). The first concentration camp was called Dachau and was established in 1933, in the beginning of Hitler’s takeover(Project Aladdin). After Dachau was created, many more camps were established. “From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called ‘enemies of the state’”(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Many of the camps that were originally created to stop the opposition of the Nazis, eventually became much more than that. For example, Dachau eventually was transitioned into a death camp where many people died. The first concentration camps were not the same as the camps in the last years of the holocaust. Camps changed their purpose and motives throughout the years of the

Construction for the subcamp began in late 1943, and the first thousand prisoners arrived November 18, 1943. They came from the mau camp of Mauthausen and its subcamps. The purpose of the camp was to provide slave labor for the underground tunnels being built, in which armament works were to be kept. The pans

The camp had been placed in pre-war Polish barracks. The barracks had large amounts of space. In each barrack they had bunks for the Jews to sleep in. In the camp watchtowers had already been built due to the barracks being a German government/military facility.

There were 18 barracks in the main camp. Two were used as a sickbay for the prisoners, two were warehouses, one was a penal block, and one barrack was used as the camp prison, until a separate prison was created. There were twelve barracks remaining. These served as prisoners' quarters. Because of poor sanitary conditions, the washroom and toilets within each barrack decayed after 1943.

strong to live through Auschwitz, and if you were not, you would most likely die.

During the April of 1945, in Germany, the World War II was drawing to a close, with the Allied Forces moving towards Berlin. Among their ranks were also soldiers that were newly trained as combat cameramen with the sole duty to document the gruesome scenes behind the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps, on behalf of the British Government. The 1945 documentary was named “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” and it was produced by Sidney Bernstein with the participation of Alfred Hitchcock.

“The second type of accommodation for prisoners at Birkenau consisted of wooden stable-barracks. The interiors, designed to hold 52 horses, were partitioned into stalls. The stalls contained three-tier wooden bunks. Several hundred prisoners lived in each such barrack.”

Epidemics and contagious diseases spread throughout the grounds. The dreadful living conditions varied in each part of the camp, in Auschwitz I prisoners lived in old brick barracks. Several hundred three-tier wooden bunk beds were installed in each building. The overcrowding in Auschwitz I forced basements and lofts to be used as living quarters as well. In Birkenau concentration camp, there were two types of barracks: brick and wooden. The brick buildings were built in great haste, without suitable insulation, on marshy ground. More than 700 people were assigned to each barrack. These barracks lacked any heating; nor did they contain sanitary

Auschwitz Concentration Camp opened in former Polish army barracks in June 1940. Twenty brick buildings were adapted, of which 6 were two-story and 14 were single-story. At the end of 1940, prisoners began adding second stories to the single-story blocks. The following spring, they started erecting 8 new blocks. This work reached completion in the first half of 1942. The result was a complex of 28 two-story blocks, the overwhelming majority of which were used to house prisoners. As a rule, there were two large rooms upstairs and a number of smaller rooms downstairs. The blocks were designed to hold about 700 prisoners each after the second stories were added, but in practice they housed up to

Auschwitz is one of the most remembered camps of WWII, but it’s not something we all really want to remember. Auschwitz was built in 1940 towards the beginning of World War 2, and it eventually became the largest of the German concentration and death camps. Concentration camps like Auschwitz during WWII were basically prisons for Jews and other German enemies. Located in southern Poland, Auschwitz started out as a political prison, but it ended up evolving into a large concentration camp holding a number of Jewish men and women. The basis of the camp consisted of 22 prewar brick buildings, but it definitely didn’t stop expanding there. After Auschwitz reached it’s peak in 1944, it took up a total of about 40 sq km in the core and

     These camps were set up along railroad lines so that the prisoners would be conveniently close to their destination. Unfortunately, many prisoners didn't even survive the train ride to the camps. Herded like cattle, exhaustion, disease, and starvation ended the long treacherous journey for many of the prisoners. On the trains, Jews were starved of food and water for days. Nearly 8% of the people did not even survive the ride to the camps. (Nyiszli, 37)

The first prisoners were put into 2 barracks in an older camp for civilian forced labourers, called the Lager Heimat; the camp was located between the old Piast and the new Günthergrube mine. A single barbed wire fence, with watch towers at the corners, surrounded the rectangular compound. Prisoners only stayed at Lager Heimat for five months and from February to June 1944, the prisoners built a new sub-camp closer to the Günthergrube mine. The new sub-camp, Lager Günther III was designed to house concentration camp prisoners. brick watchtowers overlooked the square compound from the corners of a 3-meter brick wall and ten brick barracks were built inside the camp, including three to house prisoners and one as the hospital, although construction