The camps

Established: 3 July 1942 Location: 80km north-east of Warsaw On a bend on the river Bug, three kilometers from the village of Treblinka, a “work camp” (Arbeitslager) for German and Polish prisoners hostile to the Nazi regime was set up in November 1941. The Nazis preferred to keep such prisoners “safe”, and they were used […]

Established: 2 September 1939 Location: about 30 km from Danzig After having invaded Poland, the Nazis forced 250 Polish prisoners to built Stutthot concentration camp, originally intended to be a work camp, in the vicinity of the Polish village of Sztutowo. But as events unfolded, Stutthof turned into a fully-fledged site of indiscriminate murder, complete […]

Established: March 1942 Location: north-east of Lublin The precise date for the construction of Sobibor is uncertain, but it is known that it began operations on 16 May 1942, with the arrival of its first convoy of Jews. The camp was specifically set up to exterminate Jews rounded-up in Poland, and then later, Austria, France, […]

Established: 21 May 1941 Location: about 50 km from Strasbourg After the Third Reich annexed Alsace-Lorraine, 300 prisoners despatched from Sachsenhausen were set to work constructing a camp in the Vosges region, at an altitude of 800 metres; the Nazis devoted particular attention to the construction of the camp to make it fit in with […]

Established: Spring 1941 Location: 3 km east of Lublin Situated 3 km east of Lublin (in fact in a suburb of the city Majdan Tatarski, from which it takes its name), the camp at Majdanek (Lublin-Majdanek) was created in the spring of 1941 as a prisoner-of-war camp under the jurisidiction of the Waffen-SS. But in […]

Established: 16 May 1938 Location: north-east of Nuremberg   A “border” camp, situated in north-east Bavaria near the border with the Sudeten region (which in that time was Czechoslovak territory), KL Flossenbürg opened on 3 May 1938 with prisoners sent from Dachau. It was originally intended to house “asocial” and “criminal” prisoners (who wore black […]

Established: 8 March 1934 Location: in the marshes near Papenburg, north-east of the German-Dutch border Located in the “Emsland” region, Esterwegen, together with Börgermoor, Aschendorfermoor and others was a system of 15 linked concentration camps, commonly known as the “moorlager”, which translates as the “camps in the marshes”. Orginally this complex, which had started life […]

Established: 1 August, 1938 Location: in Austria, near Linz The concentration camp of Mauthausen was constructed in August of 1938, just five months after the Anschulss, the annexation of Austria to the German Reich. The area of Mauthausen was specifically chosen as the site for a camp due to its location near a granite quarry. […]

Established: summer 1941 Location: north-east suburb of Paris Drancy was the most important transit camp for Jews captured on unoccupied French territory (the area administered by the Vichy regime), as becomes clear from the numbers of people it processed: in less than four years, 70,000 Jews of many different nationalities passed through Drancy, of whom […]

The concentration camp at Dachau was the first “official” facility of its kind in Nazi Germany, created just a few weeks after the Nazis came to power. Created by restructuring an abandoned munitions factory, the camp was originally projected to hold 5,000 prisoners. It was a “model camp”, in which methods for the psychological and […]