The most terrible concentration camp of the Nazis is the name. Terrible torture and executions from the Japanese fascists during the Second World War! They were even worse than the Germans

The concentration camps of the Third Reich (German Konzentrationslager or KZ) are zones of mass imprisonment and destruction of prisoners of war and civilians by the authorities of Nazi Germany for political or racial reasons;

they existed before and during the Second World War in German-controlled territory.

The first concentration camps were forced labor camps and were located in the Third Reich itself. During the war, millions of people were kept in the camps, among them were anti-fascists, Jews, communists, Poles, Soviet and other prisoners of war, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and others. Millions of prisoners of the concentration camps died from cruel abuse, disease, poor conditions, exhaustion, hard physical labor and inhumane medical experiments. In total, there were about five thousand camps of various purposes and capacities.

The history of the camps can be roughly divided into 4 phases:

During the first phase at the start of Nazi rule until 1934 camps began to be built throughout Germany. These camps were more similar to the prisons where the opponents of the Nazi regime were kept.

The construction of the camps was managed by several organizations: the SA, the leaders of the police and the elite NSDAP group under the leadership of Himmler, which was originally intended to protect Hitler.
During the first phase, about 26,000 people were imprisoned. Theodor Eike was appointed inspector, he supervised the construction and drafted the charters of the camps. The concentration camps became outlaw places and were inaccessible to the outside world. Even in the event of a fire, fire brigades were not allowed to enter the camp.

The second phase began in 1936 and ended in 1938. During this period, due to the growing number of prisoners, new camps began to be built. The composition of the prisoners also changed. If before 1936 these were mostly political prisoners, now asocial elements were imprisoned: the homeless and those who did not want to work. Attempts were made to cleanse society of people who "dishonored" the German nation.

During the second phase, the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald camps were built, which were signals of the beginning of the war and the increasing number of prisoners. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Jews began to be deported to the camps, which led to the overcrowding of existing camps and the construction of new ones.

Further development of the camp system took place during the third phase from the beginning of World War II and sometime before mid-1941, early 1942. After the wave of arrests in Nazi Germany, the number of prisoners doubled within a short period of time. With the outbreak of war, prisoners from conquered countries began to be sent to the camps: French, Poles, Belgians, etc. Among these prisoners were a large number of Jews and gypsies. Soon the number of prisoners in the camps built on the territories of the conquered states exceeded the number of prisoners in Germany and Austria.

The fourth and final phase began in 1942 and ended in 1945. This phase was accompanied by an intensified persecution of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. During this phase, between 2.5 and 3 million people were in the camps.

death camps(German: Vernichtungslager, extermination camps)- Institutions for the mass extermination of various groups of the population.

If the first concentration camps of Nazi Germany were created with the aim of isolating and internment of persons suspected of opposition to the Nazi regime, then later they (the camps) developed into a gigantic machine for the suppression and destruction of millions of people of different nationalities, enemies or representatives of the "lower" groups of the population - in countries who fell under the rule of the Nazis.

"Death camps", "death factories" in Nazi Germany appear since 1941 according to the racial theory of "inferior peoples". These camps were created on the territory of Eastern Europe, mainly in Poland, as well as on the territory of the Baltic countries, Belarus, and other occupied territories, in the so-called general governments.

Used by the Nazis to kill Jews, Gypsies and prisoners of other nationalities, the death camps were built according to special designs, with a calculated capacity to destroy a given number of people. The camps had special devices for massacres.

The killing of people in the death camps was put on the conveyor. The death camps for the mass murder of Jews and Gypsies were Chełmno, Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibor, and Majdanek and Auschwitz (which were also concentration camps) in Poland. In Germany itself, the Buchenwald and Dachau camps functioned.

Also, the death camps include Jasenovac (a system of camps for Serbs and Jews) in Croatia and Maly Trostenets in Belarus.

Victims, as a rule, were transported to camps in trains, and then destroyed in gas chambers.

A typical sequence of actions carried out in Auschwitz and Majdanek on civilians of Jewish and Gypsy nationalities immediately after arrival (on the way, people died in the cars from thirst, suffocation): selection for immediate destruction at the exit of the cars; immediate sending of those selected for destruction to the gas chambers. First of all, women, children, the elderly and the disabled were selected. The rest were to have a number tattoo, hard labor, hunger. Those who fell ill or simply weakened from hunger were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

In Treblinka, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, only those who helped to remove the corpses from the gas chambers and burn them, as well as sort the belongings of the dead, and those who served as guards of the camps, were temporarily left alive. All others were subject to immediate destruction.

The total number of concentration camps, their branches, prisons, ghettos in the occupied countries of Europe and in Germany itself, where people were kept and destroyed in the most difficult conditions by various methods and means - 14,033 points.

Of the 18 million citizens of European countries who passed through camps for various purposes, including concentration camps, more than 11 million people were killed.

The system of concentration camps in Germany was liquidated along with the defeat of Hitlerism, condemned in the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as a crime against humanity.

At present, Germany has adopted the division of places of forced detention of people during the Second World War into concentration camps and "other places of forced detention, under conditions equated to concentration camps," in which, as a rule, forced labor was used.

The list of concentration camps includes approximately 1,650 names of concentration camps of the international classification (main and their external teams).

On the territory of Belarus, 21 camps were approved as "other places", on the territory of Ukraine - 27 camps, on the territory of Lithuania - 9, Latvia - 2 (Salaspils and Valmiera).

On the territory of the Russian Federation, places of detention in the city of Roslavl (camp 130), the village of Uritsky (camp 142) and Gatchina are recognized as "other places".

Enlarge map
List of camps recognized by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany as concentration camps (1939-1945)
1. Arbeitsdorf (Germany)
2. Auschwitz/Oswiecim-Birkenau (Poland)
3. Bergen-Belsen (Germany)
4. Buchenwald (Germany)
5. Warsaw (Poland)
6. Herzogenbusch (Netherlands)
7. Gross-Rosen (Germany)
8. Dachau (Germany)
9. Kauen/Kaunas (Lithuania)
10. Krakow-Plaschow (Poland)
11. Sachsenhausen (GDR? FRG)
12. Lublin/Majdanek (Poland)
13. Mauthausen (Austria)
14. Mittelbau-Dora (Germany)
15. Natzweiler (France)
16. Neuengamme (Germany)
17. Niederhagen? Wewelsburg (Germany)
18. Ravensbrück (Germany)
19. Riga-Kaiserwald (Latvia)
20. Faifara/Vaivara (Estonia)
21. Flossenburg (Germany)
22. Stutthof (Poland).

Examples of heroic resistance of people doomed to death are known. Jews from the Szydlick ghetto, who mutinied in November 1942 in the Treblinka camp, were massacred by the camp guards; at the end of 1942, Jews from the Grodno ghetto offered armed resistance in the same camp. In August 1943, prisoners broke into the armory of Treblinka and attacked the camp guards; 150 rebels managed to escape but were captured and killed.

In October 1943, the prisoners of the Sobibor camp rebelled; of the 400 people who broke through the barriers, 60 managed to escape and join the Soviet partisans.

In October 1944, members of the Jewish Sonderkommando (those who carried the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria) in Auschwitz, having learned about the German intention to liquidate them, blew up the crematorium. Almost all the rebels died.

Sources: site specially for the site, author of the SNS, 06/19/11. based on materials
Holocaust on postage stamps
RIA News
military album

"Skrekkens hus" - "House of Horror" - that's what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the Gestapo headquarters in southern Norway have been located in the city archive building. Arrested people were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, from here people were sent to concentration camps and to be shot.

Now, in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where the prisoners were tortured, there is a museum that tells about what happened during the war years in the building of the state archive.
The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. There were only new lights and doors. The main exposition with archival materials, photographs, posters is arranged in the main corridor.

So the suspended arrested person was beaten with a chain.

So tortured with electric stoves. With the special zeal of the executioners, the hair on the head could catch fire in a person.

I have written about water torture before. It was also used in the Archives.

In this device, fingers were clamped, nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in its place and was saved.

Nearby - other devices for conducting interrogation with "addiction".

Reconstructions were arranged in several basements - as it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous arrested persons were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

The torture chamber was located in the next room. Here, a real scene of the torture of a married couple of underground workers taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with an intelligence center in London is reproduced. Two Gestapo men torture a wife in front of her husband, who is chained to the wall. In the corner, on an iron beam, another member of the failed underground group is suspended. They say that before interrogations, the Gestapo were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.

Everything was left in the cell, as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool at the woman's feet, you can see the mark of Kristiansand's Gestapo.

This is a reconstruction of the interrogation - the Gestapo provocateur (on the left) shows the arrested radio operator of the underground group (he is sitting on the right, in handcuffs) his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I will talk about him later.

In this showcase are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo - the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.

The system for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jewish, political, gypsy, Spanish republican, dangerous criminal, felon, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.

School tours are given to the museum. I stumbled across one of these - several local teenagers were walking down the corridors with Ture Robstad, a local war survivor volunteer. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum in the Archive every year.

Toure tells the children about Auschwitz. Two boys from the group were there recently on an excursion.

Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.

In a separate display case, things made by Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. These handicrafts were exchanged by Russians for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand had a whole collection of such wooden birds - on the way to school she often met groups of our prisoners going to work under escort, and gave them her breakfast in exchange for these carved wooden toys.

Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted to London information about the movements of German troops, the deployment of military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Fleet.

"Germany is a nation of creators."

Norwegian patriots had to work under the strongest pressure on the local population of Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of the speedy nazification of the country. Quisling's government made efforts for this in the field of education, culture, and sports. Quisling's (Nasjonal Samling) Nazi Party, even before the start of the war, inspired the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was the military power of the Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed to the intimidation of the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. With the coming to power, Quisling only stepped up his propaganda with the help of the Goebbels department. The Nazis in Norway convinced the population that only a strong Germany could protect the Norwegians from the Bolsheviks.

Several posters distributed by the Nazis in Norway. "Norges nye nabo" - "The New Norwegian Neighbor", 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of "reversing" Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.

"Do you want it to be like this?"

The propaganda of the "new Norway" in every possible way emphasized the kinship of the "Nordic" peoples, their unity in the struggle against British imperialism and the "wild Bolshevik hordes". Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon and his image in their struggle. The king's motto "Alt for Norge" was ridiculed in every possible way by the Nazis, who inspired the Norwegians that military difficulties were temporary and that Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.

Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are given over to the materials of the criminal case, according to which the seven main Gestapo men were tried in Kristiansand. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - the Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes in Norway. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, the Norwegian and foreign press took part in the process. The Gestapo were tried for torture and humiliation of those arrested, there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russian and 1 Polish prisoners of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death, which for the first time and temporarily was included in the Criminal Code of Norway immediately after the end of the war.

Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker. A notorious sadist, in Germany he had a criminal past. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, is guilty of the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war uncovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He was, like the rest of his accomplices, sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He went to Germany, where his traces were lost.

Near the building of the Archive there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and English pilots, shot down by the Germans in the sky over Kristiansand, rest. Every year on May 8, flagpoles next to the graves raise the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway.

In 1997, it was decided to sell the building of the Archive, from which the State Archive moved to another place, into private hands. Local veterans, public organizations strongly opposed, organized themselves into a special committee and ensured that in 1998 the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historic building to the veterans' committee. Now here, along with the museum that I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN.

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many have lost loved ones who were killed or tortured.

In the article we will consider the concentration camps of the Nazis and the atrocities that took place on their territories. Actually about this and much more, our large publication ...

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

The concentration camps of the Nazis were notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Contained there, mostly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system.

Life in a concentration camp

Humiliation and bullying for the prisoners began already from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water and a fenced-off latrine. The natural need of the prisoners had to celebrate publicly, in a tank, standing in the middle of the car.

But this was only the beginning, a lot of bullying and torment was being prepared for the Nazi concentration camps objectionable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the letters of the prisoners: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry ... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured ...”, “They shot, flogged, poisoned with dogs, drowned in water, beaten with sticks, starved.

Infected with tuberculosis ... strangled by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. Burned ... ". The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. Doctor Mengele became famous for his horrific experiments on prisoners, from whose hand thousands of people died.

He investigated the mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they were transplanted organs from each other, blood was transfused, sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. He did sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such bullying, we will consider the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp ration

Usually the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

bread - 130 gr; fat - 20 gr;
meat - 30 gr; cereals - 120 gr;
sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the food was used for cooking, which consisted of soup (given out 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150-200 gr). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for workers.

Those who for some reason remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a serving of bread. List of concentration camps in different countries

List of the worst concentration camps

Nazi concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. The list of them is long, but we will name the main ones:

On the territory of Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;

Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten; France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
Czechoslovakia - Kunta-gora, Natra, Glinsko; Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all the concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils concentration camp

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible concentration camp of the Nazis, because, in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and functioned from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and massacred, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors. Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned.

It was sent to medical research, during which more than 100,000 people died. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. The torture of children here was a routine affair that proceeded according to a schedule with meticulous records of the results.

Experiments on children

The testimonies of witnesses and the results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp:

beating,
hunger,
arsenic poisoning,
injection of hazardous substances (most often to children),
performing surgeries without anesthetics,
pumping out blood (only in children),
executions,
torture,
useless hard work (carrying stones from place to place),
gas chambers,
buried alive.

In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity has seen in the New Age.

Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments. Children did not stay long with their mothers, usually they were quickly taken away and distributed.

So, children under the age of six were in a special barracks, where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died in 3-4 days. In this way, the Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year. The bodies of the dead were partly burned, and partly buried in the camp.

The following figures were given in the Act of the Nuremberg trials “on the extermination of children”: during the excavation of only one fifth of the territory of the concentration camp, 633 children's bodies aged 5 to 9 years were found, arranged in layers; a platform soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children's bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible concentration camp of the Nazis, because the atrocities described above are far from all the torment that the prisoners were subjected to. So, in winter, the children brought in barefoot and naked were driven to a half-kilometer barrack, where they had to wash in ice water.

After that, the children were driven to the next building in the same way, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. At the same time, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. All who survived after this procedure were also subjected to arsenic etching. Infants were kept separately, injections were given to them, from which the child died in agony in a few days.

They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children per day died from the experiments. The bodies of the dead were taken out in large baskets and burned, thrown into cesspools or buried near the camp.

If we start listing the women's concentration camps of the Nazis, then Ravensbrück will be in the first place. It was the only camp of this type in Germany. It held thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war was overcrowded by fifteen thousand.

Mostly Russian and Polish women were kept, Jews accounted for about 15 percent. There were no written instructions regarding torture and torture; the overseers chose the line of conduct themselves. Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number.

Also, the clothes indicated racial affiliation. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) about three hundred prisoners were kept, who were placed on three-story bunks.

When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were driven into these cells, who had to sleep seven of them on the same bunk. There were several toilets and a washbasin in the barracks, but there were so few of them that the floors were littered with excrement after a few days. Such a picture was presented by almost all Nazi concentration camps (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and hardy, fit for work, were left, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops. Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps.

Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared already at the end of the war. The ashes from the crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer. The prisoners worked at least 12 hours a day.

In a special barracks called the "infirmary", German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling the test subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered for the rest of their lives from what they suffered. Experiments were also conducted with the irradiation of women with X-rays, from which hair fell out, skin was pigmented, and death occurred.

Genital organs were cut out, after which few survived, and even those quickly grew old, and at 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out by all Nazi concentration camps, the torture of women and children is the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there, the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks for the settlement of refugees.

Later, Ravensbrück turned into a stationing point for Soviet military units.

The construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, who became the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the "hellish" concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately outside the gates began "Appelplat" (parade ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite was the office, where the lagerfuhrer and the officer on duty lived - the camp authorities.

Deeper were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were arranged in the rest. The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory, their names still cause fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald.

The crematorium was considered the scariest place.

People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot, and the body was sent to the oven. Only men were kept in Buchenwald.

Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn in the first day. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp. Continuing to describe the concentration camps of the Nazis, let us turn to the so-called "small camp" of Buchenwald.

Small camp Buchenwald "Small camp" was called the quarantine zone. Living conditions here were, even in comparison with the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when the German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiègne camp were brought to this camp, mostly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were placed in tents.

The closer 1945 was, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the "small camp" included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in the concentration camps of the Nazis was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, the very life in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks, their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread, the unemployed were no longer supposed to. Relations among the prisoners were tough, documented cases of cannibalism, murder for someone else's portion of bread.

It was a common practice to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The clothes of the deceased were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only exacerbated the situation, as injection syringes were not changed. The photo is simply not able to convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. Witness accounts are not for the faint of heart.

In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to take a step forward - there were not so many experimental people in any country in the world.

Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, those inhuman sufferings that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated and organs were cut out, sterilized, castrated. They tested how long a person is able to withstand extreme cold or heat. Specially infected with diseases, introduced experimental drugs.

So, in Buchenwald, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed. In addition to typhoid, the prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid. Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the "Buchenwald witch" for her love of sadism and inhuman abuse of prisoners. She was more feared than her husband (Karl Koch) and the Nazi doctors.

She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshade". The woman owes this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of the killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945 by the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and ran the camp for two days until the American soldiers approached.

Listing the concentration camps of the Nazis, Auschwitz cannot be ignored. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died.

The exact details of the dead have not yet been clarified. Most of the victims were Jewish prisoners of war, who were destroyed immediately upon arrival in the gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name has become a household name. Above the camp gates were engraved the following words: "Work sets you free."

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called the death camp;
Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived in the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately.

Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. So, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. Gas "Cyclone B" was used. For the first time, the terrible invention was tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners with a total number of about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments began on women and men for sterilization and castration. Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners were kept working in factories and mines.

One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. About ten thousand prisoners were kept here. Like any Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were forbidden, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

On the territory of Auschwitz, five crematoria were continuously operating, which, according to experts, had a monthly output of approximately 270,000 corpses. On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was liberated by Soviet troops.

By that time, about seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year before that, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and a memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

For the entire duration of the war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. They were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It's hard to imagine what these people went through. But not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps was destined to be demolished by them.

Thanks to Stalin, after their release, when they returned home, they received the stigma of "traitors". At home, the Gulag was waiting for them, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity was replaced by another for them.

In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences. Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after their release was not advertised and hushed up. But the people who survived this simply should not be forgotten.

The dirty secret of the Nazi camps

Nazi atrocities continue to amaze modern people with their cruelty. Not so long ago, another fact was discovered that made even the worldly-wise researchers of that terrible time shudder. Unfortunately or fortunately, you will never find such information in history books...

The highest German officials during the Second World War crossed all boundaries in satisfying their secret crazy desires. To amuse their ego, and at the same time to curry favor with the Fuhrer, during the heyday of the concentration camps, they came up with a special "trick".

To implement what was conceived, a couple of Jews were brought to the house or office of a high-ranking Nazi. These could be especially "dangerous" prisoners, or those who found the strength to resist the system. Of course, these were prisoners of concentration camps, most often Auschwitz was “gotten”.

Prisoners were stripped naked and tied by the arms and legs to a urinal. In such a situation, the poor Jew had nowhere to go: the ropes rudely dug into the skin, and it was possible to freely move only the head. A high-ranking Nazi... was urinating on a tied prisoner. In fact, he used it as a toilet bowl. Often the Nazis extinguished cigarette butts on the bodies of "living drains."

It was considered a special chic to demonstrate such a toilet to your “comrades”. And here the real hell began for the unfortunate. Each guest intended to "leave his mark" on the body of the "home Jew".

Such a "toilet" could serve for a long time - a month, or even two. Until he died in terrible agony from exhaustion ...

The Nazis forced female prisoners into prostitution

Only recently, researchers found that in a dozen European concentration camps, the Nazis forced female prisoners to engage in prostitution in special brothels, writes Vladimir Ginda in the column Archive in issue 31 of the magazine Correspondent dated August 9, 2013.

Torment and death or prostitution - before such a choice, the Nazis put Europeans and Slavs who ended up in concentration camps. Of the few hundred girls who chose the second option, the administration staffed brothels in ten camps - not only in those where prisoners were used as labor, but also in others aimed at mass destruction.

In Soviet and modern European historiography, this topic did not actually exist, only a couple of American scientists - Wendy Gertjensen and Jessica Hughes - raised some aspects of the problem in their scientific works.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the German culturologist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about sexual conveyors.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the German culturologist Robert Sommer began to scrupulously restore information about the sexual conveyors that operated in the horrific conditions of German concentration camps and death factories.

The result of nine years of research was the book published by Sommer in 2009 Brothel in a concentration camp which shocked European readers. On the basis of this work, an exhibition was organized in Berlin, Sex Work in Concentration Camps.

Bed motivation

“Legalized sex” appeared in Nazi concentration camps in 1942. The SS men organized brothels in ten institutions, among which were mainly the so-called labor camps - in the Austrian Mauthausen and its branch Gusen, the German Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen and Dora-Mittelbau.

In addition, the institute of forced prostitutes was also introduced in three death camps intended for the extermination of prisoners: in the Polish Auschwitz-Auschwitz and its “satellite” Monowitz, as well as in the German Dachau.

The idea of creating camp brothels belonged to the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The researchers' data suggests that he was impressed by the incentive system used in Soviet forced labor camps to increase inmate productivity.

Himmler decided to adopt the experience, along the way adding to the list of “incentives” something that was not in the Soviet system - “encouraging” prostitution. The SS chief was convinced that the right to visit a brothel, along with other bonuses - cigarettes, cash or camp vouchers, improved rations - could make the prisoners work harder and better.

In fact, the right to visit such establishments was predominantly held by camp guards from among the prisoners. And there is a logical explanation for this: most of the male prisoners were exhausted, so they did not think about any sexual attraction.

Hughes points out that the proportion of male prisoners who used the services of brothels was extremely small. In Buchenwald, according to her data, where about 12.5 thousand people were kept in September 1943, 0.77% of prisoners visited the public barracks in three months. A similar situation was in Dachau, where, as of September 1944, 0.75% of the 22 thousand prisoners who were there used the services of prostitutes.

heavy share

At the same time, up to two hundred sex slaves worked in brothels. Most of the women, two dozen, were kept in a brothel in Auschwitz.

Brothel workers were exclusively female prisoners, usually attractive, between the ages of 17 and 35. About 60-70% of them were of German origin, from among those whom the Reich authorities called "anti-social elements."

Some were engaged in prostitution before entering the concentration camps, so they agreed to similar work, but already behind barbed wire, without any problems and even passed on their skills to inexperienced colleagues.

Approximately a third of the sex slaves the SS recruited from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians. Jewish women were not allowed to do such work, and Jewish prisoners were not allowed to visit brothels.

These workers wore special insignia - black triangles sewn on the sleeves of their robes.

About a third of the sex slaves the SS recruited from prisoners of other nationalities - Poles, Ukrainians or Belarusians

Some of the girls voluntarily agreed to “work”. So, one former employee of the medical unit of Ravensbrück, the largest female concentration camp in the Third Reich, where up to 130 thousand people were kept, recalled: some women voluntarily went to a brothel because they were promised release after six months of work.

Spaniard Lola Casadel, a member of the Resistance movement, who ended up in the same camp in 1944, told how the headman of their barracks announced: “Whoever wants to work in a brothel, come to me. And remember: if there are no volunteers, we will have to resort to force.”

The threat was not empty: as Sheina Epshtein, a Jewish woman from the Kaunas ghetto, recalled, in the camp the inhabitants of the women's barracks lived in constant fear of the guards, who regularly raped the prisoners. The raids were made at night: drunken men walked along the bunks with flashlights, choosing the most beautiful victim.

“Their joy knew no bounds when they discovered that the girl was a virgin. Then they laughed out loud and called their colleagues,” Epstein said.

Having lost honor, and even the will to fight, some girls went to brothels, realizing that this was their last hope for survival.

“The most important thing is that we managed to escape from [the camps] Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück,” Liselotte B., a former prisoner at the Dora-Mittelbau camp, said of her “bed career”. “The main thing was to somehow survive.”

With Aryan meticulousness

After the initial selection, the workers were brought to special barracks in those concentration camps where they were planned to be used. To bring the emaciated prisoners into a more or less decent appearance, they were placed in the infirmary. There, paramedics in SS uniform gave them calcium injections, they took disinfectant baths, ate, and even sunbathed under quartz lamps.

There was no sympathy in all this, but only calculation: the bodies were prepared for hard work. As soon as the rehabilitation cycle ended, the girls became part of the sex assembly line. Work was daily, rest - only if there was no light or water, if an air raid alert was announced, or during the broadcast of speeches by the German leader Adolf Hitler on the radio.

The conveyor worked like clockwork and strictly on schedule. For example, in Buchenwald, prostitutes got up at 7:00 and took care of themselves until 19:00: they had breakfast, did exercises, underwent daily medical examinations, washed and cleaned, and dined. By camp standards, there was so much food that prostitutes even exchanged food for clothes and other things. Everything ended with dinner, and from seven in the evening the two-hour work began. Camp prostitutes could not go out to see her only if they had “these days” or they fell ill.

The very procedure for providing intimate services, starting from the selection of men, was as detailed as possible. Mostly the so-called camp functionaries could get a woman - internees who were engaged in internal security and guards from among the prisoners.

Moreover, at first the doors of brothels were opened exclusively to the Germans or representatives of the peoples living on the territory of the Reich, as well as to the Spaniards and Czechs. Later, the circle of visitors was expanded - only Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and ordinary internees were excluded from it. For example, visit logs of a brothel in Mauthausen, meticulously kept by administration officials, show that 60% of the clients were criminals.

Men who wanted to indulge in carnal pleasures first had to get permission from the camp leadership. After that, they bought an entrance ticket for two Reichsmarks - this is slightly less than the cost of 20 cigarettes sold in the dining room. Of this amount, a quarter went to the woman herself, and only if she was German.

In the camp brothel, clients, first of all, found themselves in the waiting room, where their data was verified. Then they underwent a medical examination and received prophylactic injections. Next, the visitor was told the number of the room where he should go. There the intercourse took place. Only the “missionary position” was allowed. Conversations were not welcome.

Here is how one of the “concubines” kept there, Magdalena Walter, describes the work of a brothel in Buchenwald: “We had one bathroom with a toilet, where women went to wash themselves before the next visitor arrived. Immediately after washing, the client appeared. Everything worked like a conveyor; men were not allowed to stay in the room for more than 15 minutes.”

During the evening, the prostitute, according to the surviving documents, took 6-15 people.

body in action

Legalized prostitution was beneficial to the authorities. So, in Buchenwald alone, in the first six months of operation, the brothel earned 14-19 thousand Reichsmarks. The money went to the account of the German Economic Policy Department.

The Germans used women not only as an object of sexual pleasure, but also as scientific material. The inhabitants of the brothels carefully monitored hygiene, because any venereal disease could cost them their lives: infected prostitutes in the camps were not treated, but experiments were performed on them.

The scientists of the Reich did this, fulfilling the will of Hitler: even before the war, he called syphilis one of the most dangerous diseases in Europe, capable of leading to disaster. The Fuhrer believed that only those peoples who would find a way to quickly cure the disease would be saved. For the sake of obtaining a miracle cure, the SS men turned infected women into living laboratories. However, they did not stay alive for long - intensive experiments quickly led the prisoners to a painful death.

Researchers have found a number of cases where even healthy prostitutes were given to be torn to pieces by sadistic doctors.

Pregnant women were not spared in the camps either. In some places they were immediately killed, in some places they were artificially interrupted, and after five weeks they were again sent “into service”. Moreover, abortions were performed at different times and in different ways - and this also became part of the research. Some prisoners were allowed to give birth, but only in order to experimentally determine how long a baby could live without food.

Despicable Prisoners

According to the former prisoner of Buchenwald, Dutchman Albert van Dijk, other prisoners despised the camp prostitutes, not paying attention to the fact that they were forced to go “on the panel” by cruel conditions of detention and an attempt to save their lives. And the very work of the inhabitants of brothels was akin to daily repeated rape.

Some of the women, even being in a brothel, tried to defend their honor. For example, Walter came to Buchenwald as a virgin and, being in the role of a prostitute, tried to protect herself from the first client with scissors.

The attempt failed, and, according to the records, on the same day, the former virgin satisfied six men. Walter endured this because she knew that otherwise she would face a gas chamber, a crematorium or a barracks for cruel experiments.

Not everyone was strong enough to survive the violence. Some of the inhabitants of the camp brothels, according to researchers, took their own lives, some lost their minds. Some survived, but remained a prisoner of psychological problems for life.

Physical liberation did not relieve them of the burden of the past, and after the war, camp prostitutes were forced to hide their history. Therefore, scientists have collected little documented evidence of life in these brothels.

"It's one thing to say 'I worked as a carpenter' or 'I built roads' and quite another to say 'I was forced to work as a prostitute'," said Inza Eshebach, director of the memorial at the former Ravensbrück camp.

1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - overseer of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Among the nicknames of Irma were "Blond-haired devil", "Angel of death", "Beautiful monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, bludgeoned women to death, and reveled in the arbitrary shooting of prisoners. She starved her dogs to set them on her victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Greze wore heavy boots, and in addition to a pistol, she always had a wicker whip.

In the Western post-war press, the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer (“Belsen Beast”) were constantly discussed.
On April 17, 1945, she was taken prisoner by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Josef Kramer, warden Joanna Bormann, nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang along with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese's neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was "Faster", addressed to the English executioner.

2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. Best known under a pseudonym as "Frau Lampshade" Received the nickname "Buchenwald Witch" for the cruel torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and in 1947 sentenced to life imprisonment. However, a few years later, the American General Lucius Clay, the military commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of issuing execution orders and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused a protest from the public, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in a cell in the Bavarian Eibach prison.

3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - overseer of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then she was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said that they were subjected to ill-treatment by Danz. She beat them, confiscated their winter clothes. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners without giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed an underage girl.
Danz was arrested on 1 June 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 for health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said that Danz would be too hard to endure a re-imprisonment. She lives in Germany. Now she is 94 years old.

4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) Between 1940 and December 1943 she worked as a fashion model. In January 1944, she became a warden at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of whom she beat to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel, but also very beautiful, that the female prisoners called her "Beautiful Ghost".

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the train station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the policemen guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed a great pleasure, and the pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged on Biskupska Gorka near Gdansk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned, and the ashes were publicly washed away in the closet of the house where she was born.

5) Hertha Gertrud Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - overseer of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942 she received an invitation to work as a warden in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp near the city of Gdańsk. In it, Bothe was nicknamed "The Sadist of Stutthof" because of her mistreatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944 she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a warden during the death march of prisoners, which took place from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a group of women, consisting of 60 people and engaged in the production of wood.

After the camp was liberated, she was arrested. At the Belzensky court, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than the specified date on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she is directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Colleagues in the service described Mandel as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. The Auschwitz prisoners among themselves called her a monster. Mandel personally selected prisoners, and sent them to the gas chambers by the thousands. There are cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when they bored her, she put them on the lists for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and the creation of a women's camp orchestra, which met new prisoners at the gates with cheerful music. According to the recollections of the survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, she personally came to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of head of the Muldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown, Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, as a war criminal, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia -?) - senior warden in the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.

Hildegard Neumann began her service in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming a head overseer. Due to good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and another 55,000 died in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and was not prosecuted for war crimes. Hildegard Neumann's subsequent fate is unknown.

On April 27, 1940, the first Auschwitz concentration camp was created, designed for the mass extermination of people.

Concentration camp - places for forced isolation of real or perceived opponents of the state, the political regime, etc. Unlike prisons, ordinary camps for prisoners of war and refugees, concentration camps were created according to special decrees during the war, the aggravation of the political struggle.

In fascist Germany, concentration camps are an instrument of mass state terror and genocide. Although the term "concentration camp" was used to refer to all Nazi camps, there were actually several types of camps, and the concentration camp was just one of them.

Other types of camps included labor and hard labor camps, extermination camps, transit camps, and POW camps. As the war progressed, the distinction between concentration camps and labor camps became increasingly blurred, as hard labor was used in the concentration camps as well.

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were created after the Nazis came to power in order to isolate and repress opponents of the Nazi regime. The first concentration camp in Germany was established near Dachau in March 1933.

By the beginning of World War II, 300 thousand German, Austrian and Czech anti-fascists were in prisons and concentration camps in Germany. In subsequent years, Nazi Germany created a gigantic network of concentration camps on the territory of the European countries it occupied, turned into places for the organized systematic murder of millions of people.

Fascist concentration camps were intended for the physical destruction of entire peoples, primarily Slavic; total extermination of Jews, Gypsies. To do this, they were equipped with gas chambers, gas chambers and other means of mass extermination of people, crematoria.

(Military Encyclopedia. Chairman of the Main Editorial Commission S.B. Ivanov. Military Publishing. Moscow. In 8 volumes - 2004. ISBN 5 - 203 01875 - 8)

There were even special death camps (destruction), where the liquidation of prisoners went on at a continuous and accelerated pace. These camps were designed and built not as places of detention, but as death factories. It was assumed that in these camps, people doomed to death had to spend literally a few hours. In such camps, a well-functioning conveyor was built, turning several thousand people a day into ashes. These include Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka and others.

Concentration camp prisoners were deprived of their freedom and the ability to make decisions. The SS strictly controlled all aspects of their lives. Violators of the order were severely punished, subjected to beatings, solitary confinement, deprivation of food and other forms of punishment. Prisoners were classified according to their place of birth and reasons for imprisonment.

Initially, prisoners in the camps were divided into four groups: political opponents of the regime, representatives of "inferior races", criminals and "unreliable elements". The second group, including Gypsies and Jews, was subject to unconditional physical extermination and was kept in separate barracks.

They were subjected to the most cruel treatment by the SS guards, they were starved, sent to the most exhausting work. Among the political prisoners were members of anti-Nazi parties, primarily communists and social democrats, members of the Nazi party accused of serious crimes, listeners of foreign radio, members of various religious sects. Among the "unreliable" were homosexuals, alarmists, dissatisfied, etc.

The concentration camps also housed criminals who were used by the administration as overseers of political prisoners.

All prisoners of the concentration camps were required to wear distinctive signs on their clothes, including a serial number and a colored triangle ("Winkel") on the left side of the chest and right knee. (In Auschwitz, the serial number was tattooed on the left forearm.) All political prisoners wore a red triangle, criminals - green, "unreliable" - black, homosexuals - pink, gypsies - brown.

In addition to the classification triangle, the Jews also wore yellow, as well as a six-pointed "Star of David". A Jew who violated racial laws ("racial defiler") had to wear a black border around a green or yellow triangle.

Foreigners also had their own distinctive signs (the French wore a sewn letter "F", the Poles - "P", etc.). The letter "K" denoted a war criminal (Kriegsverbrecher), the letter "A" denoted a violator of labor discipline (from German Arbeit - "work"). The feeble-minded wore the patch Blid - "fool". Prisoners who participated or were suspected of escaping were required to wear a red and white target on their chest and back.

Of the 18 million citizens of European countries who passed through camps for various purposes, including concentration camps, more than 11 million people were killed.

Currently, Germany has adopted the division of places of forced detention of people during the Second World War into concentration camps and "other places of forced detention, under conditions equated to concentration camps," in which, as a rule, forced labor was used.

The list of concentration camps includes approximately 1,650 names of concentration camps of the international classification (main and their external teams).

On the territory of Belarus, 21 camps were approved as "other places", on the territory of Ukraine - 27 camps, on the territory of Lithuania - 9, Latvia - 2 (Salaspils and Valmiera).

On the territory of the Russian Federation, places of detention in the city of Roslavl (camp 130), the village of Uritsky (camp 142) and Gatchina are recognized as "other places".

List of camps recognized by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany as concentration camps (1939-1945)

1.Arbeitsdorf (Germany)
2. Auschwitz/Oswiecim-Birkenau (Poland)
3. Bergen-Belsen (Germany)
4. Buchenwald (Germany)
5. Warsaw (Poland)
6. Herzogenbusch (Netherlands)
7. Gross-Rosen (Germany)
8. Dachau (Germany)
9. Kauen/Kaunas (Lithuania)
10. Krakow-Plaschow (Poland)
11. Sachsenhausen (GDR‑FRG)
12. Lublin/Majdanek (Poland)
13. Mauthausen (Austria)
14. Mittelbau-Dora (Germany)
15. Natzweiler (France)
16. Neuengamme (Germany)
17. Niederhagen-Wewelsburg (Germany)
18. Ravensbrück (Germany)
19. Riga-Kaiserwald (Latvia)
20. Faifara/Vaivara (Estonia)
21. Flossenburg (Germany)
22. Stutthof (Poland).

Major Nazi concentration camps

Buchenwald is one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. It was created in 1937 in the vicinity of the city of Weimar (Germany). Originally called Ettersberg. Had 66 branches and external working teams. The largest ones: "Dora" (near the city of Nordhausen), "Laura" (near the city of Saalfeld) and "Ohrdruf" (in Thuringia), where the FAA projectiles were mounted. From 1937 to 1945 about 239 thousand people were prisoners of the camp. In total, 56 thousand prisoners of 18 nationalities were tortured in Buchenwald.

The camp was liberated on April 10, 1945 by units of the 80th US division. In 1958, a memorial complex dedicated to him was opened in Buchenwald. heroes and victims of the concentration camp.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau), also known by the German names Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a complex of German concentration camps located in 1940-1945. in southern Poland, 60 km west of Krakow. The complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz-1 (served as the administrative center of the entire complex), Auschwitz-2 (also known as Birkenau, "death camp"), Auschwitz-3 (a group of approximately 45 small camps created at factories and mines around general complex).

More than 4 million people died in Auschwitz, including more than 1.2 million Jews, 140 thousand Poles, 20 thousand Gypsies, 10 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and tens of thousands of prisoners of other nationalities.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. In 1947, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Oswiecim-Brzezinka) was opened in Oswiecim.

Dachau (Dachau) - the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, established in 1933 on the outskirts of Dachau (near Munich). Had about 130 branches and external work teams located in Southern Germany. More than 250 thousand people from 24 countries were prisoners of Dachau; about 70 thousand people were tortured or killed (including about 12 thousand Soviet citizens).

In 1960, a monument to the dead was unveiled in Dachau.

Majdanek (Majdanek) - a Nazi concentration camp, was created in the suburbs of the Polish city of Lublin in 1941. It had branches in southeastern Poland: Budzyn (near Krasnik), Plaszow (near Krakow), Travniki (near Vepshem), two camps in Lublin. According to the Nuremberg trials, in 1941-1944. in the camp, the Nazis destroyed about 1.5 million people of various nationalities. The camp was liberated by Soviet troops on July 23, 1944. In 1947, a museum and research institute was opened in Majdanek.

Treblinka - Nazi concentration camps near the station. Treblinka in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland. In Treblinka I (1941-1944, the so-called labor camp), about 10 thousand people died, in Treblinka II (1942-1943, an extermination camp) - about 800 thousand people (mostly Jews). In August 1943, in Treblinka II, the Nazis suppressed an uprising of prisoners, after which the camp was liquidated. The Treblinka I camp was liquidated in July 1944 when the Soviet troops approached.

In 1964, on the site of Treblinka II, a memorial symbolic cemetery for the victims of fascist terror was opened: 17,000 tombstones made of irregularly shaped stones, a monument-mausoleum.

Ravensbruck (Ravensbruck) - a concentration camp was founded near the city of Furstenberg in 1938 as an exclusively female camp, but later a small camp for men and another for girls were created nearby. In 1939-1945. 132,000 women and several hundred children from 23 European countries passed through the death camp. 93 thousand people were destroyed. On April 30, 1945, the prisoners of Ravensbrück were liberated by the soldiers of the Soviet army.

Mauthausen (Mauthausen) - a concentration camp was established in July 1938, 4 km from the city of Mauthausen (Austria) as a branch of the Dachau concentration camp. Since March 1939 - an independent camp. In 1940, it was merged with the Gusen concentration camp and became known as Mauthausen-Gusen. It had about 50 branches scattered throughout the territory of the former Austria (Ostmark). During the existence of the camp (until May 1945) there were about 335 thousand people from 15 countries in it. Only according to the surviving records, more than 122 thousand people were killed in the camp, including more than 32 thousand Soviet citizens. The camp was liberated on May 5, 1945 by American troops.

After the war, on the site of Mauthausen, 12 states, including the Soviet Union, created a memorial museum, erected monuments to those who died in the camp.