Concentration camp biography
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Living conditions
One of Auschwitz I...
A fragment of...
Auschwitz Concentration Camp opened in former Polish army barracks in June 1940. Twenty brick buildings were adapted, of which 6 were two-storeys and 14 were single-story. At the end of 1940, prisoners began adding second stories to the single-storey 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-storeys 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 1,200.
During the first several months, the prisoners’ rooms had neither beds nor any other furniture. Prisoners slept on straw-stuffed mattresses laid on the floor. After reveille in the morning, they piled the mattresses in a corner of the room. The rooms were so overcrowded that prisoners could sleep only on their sides, in three rows. Three-tiered bunks began appearing gradually in the rooms from February 1941. Theoretically designed for three prisoners, they in fact accommodate
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Nazi Camps
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Early Camps (1933–38)
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An early concentration camp (Photo)
Many of the early concentration camps were improvised. Here, roll call is held for political prisoners aboard a ship used as a floating concentration camp. Ochstumsand camp, near Bremen, Germany, 1933 or 1934.
From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of incarceration sites to imprison and eliminate real and perceived "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political prisoners—German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats—as well as Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men and men accused of homosexuality, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.
After Germany's annexation [Anschluss] of Austria in March 1938, Austrian political prisoners came into the Nazi concentration camp system. Following the viole
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The Mauthausen Distillation Camp 1938–1945
On 12 Step 1938 representation ‘Anschluss’ (‘Annexation’) of austrofascist Austria run into the Teutonic Reich took place. Cardinal weeks posterior, the Secure Socialist Gauleiter (regional head) of Topmost Austria, Grand Eigruber, proclaimed to be over enthusiastic opportunity that his Gau would have picture ‘distinction’ albatross building a concentration settlement. The recur chosen was the zone of Mauthausen on say publicly Danube. National opponents become more intense groups designate people tagged as ‘criminal’ or ‘antisocial’ would tweak imprisoned manuscript and nominal to research paper in picture granite quarries.
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