Camps

When those being persecuted under the Nazi rule were deported, they were sent to one of the following types of "camps."

Concentration / Labor Camps - These were the first camps invented by the Nazi government. The first, Dachau, had the purpose of holding and torturing political prisoners. Within a year these camps had become centers for the slave labor and toture of Jews and others being persecuted in the Holocaust. There were estimated to have been around 15,000 concentration camps, some of the major ones include; Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Chelmno, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mathausen, and Ravensbrück.

Transit Camps - Transit Camps served as temporary areas for those on their way to other camps. These were used as there weren't sufficent railroads from each area where the victims were being deported from to thier destination. These included; Amersfoort, Bolzano, Fort de Romainville, Malchow, Soldau and Westerbork.

Death Camps - Primarily or exclusively built for mass murder, few ever left these camps. These camps can be differentiated from labor camps and concentration camps in this way; while all sorts of camps had high death rates from the poor living conditions, only these extremination camps were designed to kill. Few lived in these camps and their jobs often to simply sort through the belongings of the recently deceased and the operate the crematoria and gas chambers (Sonderkommando). There were only 5 true death camps; they include Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.