There are many indelible images of the Second World War: the flag-raising on Iwo Jima; the Russian soldier hoisting a red banner signifying victory at Stalingrad; crowds thronging the streets on V-E Day in London…. But the images that most unforgettably define the cruelest era of humankind are those showing the piles of bodies and the masses of nearly dead prisoners discovered after the liberation of the concentration camps. (You’ll be shocked by these horrifying images of Nazi death camps.)
While he was in prison following the failed attempt to take over the government in Bavaria in 1923, Adolf Hitler wrote his autobiography, “Mein Kampf.” It expressed key tenets of Nazism, such as virulent antisemitism; contempt for Bolshevism and the belief that Slavs were subhuman; and the necessity of seizing “living space” in Eastern Europe for Germany.
After Hitler gained power in 1933, the Nazis began setting up concentration camps to incarcerate political enemies of the regime, as well as intellectuals, homosexuals, communists, gypsies, and – most of all – Jews. The Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 accelerated the rounding up of Jewish citizens for these camps, at first primarily to be used for forced labor.
In January 1942, however, after the Germans had overrun Poland and much of Western Europe and invaded the Soviet Union, Nazi officials convened at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to decide on a ”permanent solution” to what they called the “Jewish problem.” From that conference came the creation of a network of extermination camps intended to wipe out the Jews in Europe.
The Nazis and their allies established more than 44,000 camps and sub-camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos, between 1933 to 1945, using them as transit points for temporary detention of prisoners, and for forced labor, medical experiments, and ultimately the extermination of Jews and other perceived “undesirables.” (These are 30 symbols used by the Nazis to mark their victims.)
Click here to see 25 infamous Nazi concentration camps.
To compile a list of 25 of the most infamous concentration camps built by Nazi Germany before and during World War II, 24/7 Tempo exercised editorial discretion after consulting numerous news and Jewish heritage sites, including the Jewish Virtual Library, the United States Holocaust Memorial Musem, and the Wiener Holocaust Library.