Yisrael Katz, Jerusalem. The links of the necklace depict scenes of daily life in the camp. Szainer was imprisoned in and gave the necklace to his wife when she visited him. In , Szainer was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered. Serge Klarsfeld, Paris, and Mr. Alexandre Oler, Nice. Gift of C. On March 9, , several weeks after Hitler assumed power, the first organized attacks on German opponents of the regime and on Jews broke out across Germany.
Less than two weeks later, Dachau , the first Nazi concentration camp, was opened. Situated near Munich, Dachau became a place of internment for German Jews, Communists, Socialists, and liberals — anyone whom the Reich considered its enemy.
With the issuance of Civilian Restrictive Order No. Korematsu argued that Executive Order was unconstitutional and that it violated the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Were the Japanese internment camps concentration camps? Internment of Japanese Americans. The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in concentration camps in the western interior of the country of about , people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific Coast.
What happened to the internment camps? Japanese American internment happened during World War II, when the United States government forced about , Japanese Americans to leave their homes and live in internment camps.
These were like prisons. What is the purpose of internment camps? Who started internment camps? President Franklin Roosevelt. Seldom they received a spoon full of marmalade with their bread, margarine, a chunk of sausage made from horse meat or cheese. Next there was time for "relaxation. At , the lights were switched off and there was to be absolute silence.
Undernourished as the prisoners were, they had to perform extremely hard work. Between and , building in the camp continued. In this period, some 70 Arbeitskommandos have performed all sorts of construction work from ground work to building barracks, watchtowers, fences, warehouses and offices.
The ground work claimed the most energy. Large tracts of terrain had to leveled and sand and rocks were disposed of in large quantities. When constructing infrastructure, less prisoners were deployed, simply because skilled workers like electricians and plumbers who were scarce, were required for this. Some 20 Arbeitskommandos were charged with the daily cleaning of the camp.
The so-called Feldkolonne was charged with cleaning the barracks and shoveling snow during the winter months. As this was by far the dirtiest work, Jews were mainly employed. This job had one advantage: because these prisoners smelled so terribly, they were usually left alone by the SS. There also were special Kommandos for all sorts of jobs. For instance disposal of garbage from the SS barracks and offices, cleaning dog houses and stables and maintaining buildings and gardens.
The work that was done in the many different workshops in Majdanek merits separate mention. There was a carpentry shop for making and repairing bunks and tables. This command also renovated sheds. A forgery provided all sorts of tools and the SS could have their broken radios and electric stoves fixed in an electricity workshop.
From early onwards, there even was a completely equipped garage where a group of 20 prisoners maintained vehicles and converted gasoline and diesel engines to gas fueled engines. From onwards, about prisoners, mainly women, were employed in the various tailor shops and a completely equipped shoemakers shop. Clothes of those who had arrived in transports were mended for use by German citizens.
Winter clothing for the German military was also produced here and the uniforms of the SS guards were repaired. The Effektenkammer was the warehouse where the possessions of prisoners were stored. Clothing of the murdered Jews was sorted and searched for valuables before it was transported to Germany by the wagon load.
From early spring until late autumn, some 1, prisoners were put to work on the various farms mentioned earlier which were run by the camp. This was exceptionally hard work: digging, ploughing, mowing, planting, harvesting in the open air without any protection whatsoever from the weather. Food for prisoners and the SS was delivered by other Kommandos and distributed among the various kitchens on the vast premises.
Finally there was the Sonderkommando whose members were strictly isolated from the other prisoners. As the name suggests, they were no normal prisoners doing the usual handiwork of their fellow inhabitants.
Their task consisted of taking the corpses out of the gas chambers and burning them in the crematories. The part of the Sonderkommando that burned corpses in the forest of Krepieckin and was called the Waldkommando. The fate of the members of the Sonderkommando was a foregone conclusion; they were executed regularly as unwilling witnesses of crimes that had to be kept secret forever.
Majdanek was no exception. As early as , the DAW used prisoners from the labor camp on Lipowastreet in Lublin and after it was opened, Majdanek could not avoid playing its part in meeting the demand of laborers. In , the DAW opened a workshop in the camp where 60 men were employed repairing skis.
The next year a shoemakers shop was opened that employed over forced laborers. The Ostindustrie GmbH had four plants in Majdanek, one where brushes and baskets were made, a brickyard, a metal workshop and a small pharmaceutical enterprise.
In the metal shop, prisoners disassembled broken weapons and refurbished tools. Sekel, the physician of the SS garrison in Lublin was in charge of the pharmaceutical enterprise employing some 35 prisoners, mainly Jewish physicians and pharmacists from the Netherlands.
Outside Majdanek, forced laborers from the camp were also employed. This way, the Lublin district grew into one of the largest centers of forced labor in occupied Europe. In addition to the SS enterprises, others also employed forced laborers from Majdanek.
The Zentralbauleitung had hundreds of prisoners build a gas factory in Lublin. Civil agencies and organizations did not lag behind. Prisoners worked in the city laundry, the power plant and the railways. Various contractors employed the cheap labor, on average 45 prisoners per building site. Civil enterprises paid 4 Reichsmark a day for skilled workers and 3 for unskilled.
SS enterprises on the other hand paid 30 pfennig per day for a laborer, skilled or unskilled. From June 1, onwards, when the enterprises were struggling economically because of the war effort, the prices were made equal to those of the SS. Owing to the extremely poor and small amount of food of less than calories per day alone, large groups of prisoners were more or less unavoidably marked for death. They wasted away fast and visibly, their skin turned a bluish gray and in the long run they became totally apathetic.
In Majdanek these persons were called gamle, a word from the German-Silesian dialect meaning idiot. In the last phase of starvation they were beyond help. When they still showed some signs of life, they disappeared into the gas chambers. Not just the hunger but beatings and executions also took their toll among the prisoners. In the case of penalties, the most widely applied method was a lashing with a whip. Prisoners were beaten even for the slightest violation of the camp rules until they lost consciousness.
Thereby it was utterly unimportant whether the victim was sick or dying. Just being Jew or Roma was also ample reason to be beaten. Violation of camp rules was not at all necessary really: whenever the guards felt like it, they struck at will.
An official punishment for a transgression of the camp rules was preceded by a report from the guards to the camp management.
Not only individual prisoners but entire groups were also subjected to these sanctions. These punishments always took place after roll call. The lashing was administered on a special table called the Block. Among prisoners the torture apparatus was - off the record - known as the concert piano. The tabletop was semicircular and made of thick planks.
The victim was to lay on his stomach and two SS men turned his arms between his shoulder blades. Two other SS men subsequently started lashing him with whips or sticks. The number of lashings varied between 10 and or more.
The victim was to count the number of lashes himself. As many of them did not speak German, this frequently went wrong and the prisoner had to start counting all over again. It goes without saying these lashings caused large open wounds on the back and these in turn led to festering infections that were scarcely treated if at all.
Irreparable damage to internal organs like kidneys was the rule rather than an exception. In addition, they always risked ending up on the pillar. That was a wooden pole from which a person was hanged at the wrists with his hands bound behind his back and his feet just above the ground, often with dislocated shoulders as a result. More serious violations of the camp rules, like attempts at escape, were always punished with death by hanging.
That was always done during evening roll call in the presence of the camp commander, a physician and the SS guards of the Feld in question. From the autumn of onwards, the number of penalties decreased for a simple reason: afterwards the prisoners were no longer able to work and all available manpower was badly needed.
This did not mean though that SS guards and Kapos changed their behavior in any way. After he had selected a victim he habitually struck the person down with one blow on the liver, the stomach or an ear.
Every prisoner knew him, some even thought he was the camp commander. According to the prisoners, Thumann was a tall, lean, handsome man, always well dressed and wearing gloves. He was an extreme sadist an inseparable from his huge dog Boris. Various stories about his behavior have been preserved. For instance, one day he drove into a group of prisoners on his motorcycle.
He selected two of them and tied their hands to his motorbike with a rope. Then he accelerated and towed them across the camp grounds until nothing more was left of them than a unrecognizable bloody mass.
He also had the habit to administer or more whip lashes on his own initiative. Thumann was executed by the British on October 8, after having spread death and destruction in camp Neuengamme in the last year of the war.
Up until today, it still has not been determined exactly how many prisoners actually perished in Majdanek. Since the liberation of the camp, various estimates have circulated. The most recent research by Tomasz Kranz, a historian from Lublin, in arrives at a number of some 78, The sinister reputation Majdanek has earned in the history of the Holocaust is for a part attributable to the events on just one day in November during Aktion Erntefest harvest festival.
This code name hid the final act of Aktion Reinhard, intended to exterminate all Polish Jews in the General Government and the region around Biyalistok. Aktion Erntefest was a large scale operation of mass executions intended to liquidate all Jews in Majdanek and the labor camps in and around Lublin.
In the Lublin region it entailed the camps of Trawniki, Poniatowa, Budzyn, Zamosc and Biala Podlaska and in the city itself the labor camps at Lipowastreet and the camp on the airfield.
It mainly concerned survivors of the liquidated ghettoes of Warsaw, Biyalistok and large groups of Jews from Lublin who were housed on these locations. The reason for Aktion Erntefest the world was told was to solve a security problem. This has undoubtedly played a role. After the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in May , the unease within the leadership of the SS grew.
The number of prisoners in Majdanek grew explosively and it was considered increasingly dangerous to concentrate so many Jews in one camp. The uprisings in the ghetto of Biyalistok, in Camp Treblinka in August and in Camp Sobibor in October had clearly shown this could lead to uncontrollable situations.
This could seriously undermine the position of the SS and consequently that of Himmler in this region which was so important for the war industry. However, ideological considerations in Aktion Erntefest can hardly be overestimated.
The SS in its entirety and Himmler in particular saw themselves as the instrument to achieve their ultimate goal: the total extermination of all Jews in Europe. The concentration of tens of thousands of Jews in the Lublin region offered them an golden opportunity to realize this ambition.
Jewish prisoners in the labor camps may have fostered hope and illusions that they would survive the war because the Nazis needed their labor but they had not reckoned with racial hatred taking priority over purely economical considerations. At the end of October , after months of preparation in the strictest secrecy, H-Hour dawned. Himmler ordered the liquidation of all labor camps in the Lublin region in the shortest time possible in one swift action. Prisoners in Majdanek were ordered to start digging ditches in only a few days, allegedly to prevent Allied aircraft from landing.
Soon, rumors circulated among the prisoners something special was brewing but none of them could have the slightest idea what was actually awaiting them. Police units would also participate in the action. In the early morning of November 3, , Majdanek was completely cordoned off by units of the SS and the police. Morning roll call that day was unusually short.
The SS sent the non-Jewish inmates back to their barracks. The Jewish inmates were taken to a part near the crematory and the newly dug ditches, along with fellow inmates who had been brought in from Lublin and the labor camps in the region. At some camps inmates could still receive and send post. The Red Cross facilitated many of these letters between countries at war with each other. This telegram was sent from Dr. Wilhelm Gross, who was incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp, to his daughter Dora Gross, who had escaped as a refugee to Britain.
Transit camps were camps where prisoners were briefly detained prior to deportation to other Nazi camps. Following the start of the Second World War , the Nazis occupied a number of countries. Here, they implemented antisemitic and racial policies as they had done in Germany. These policies led to the establishment of a number of transit camps across the different occupied countries. Prisoners were held in these camps prior to their deportation to other camps, such as Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.
Overall, the conditions in the transit camps were similar to that of concentration camps — unsanitary and awful. Facilities were poor and overcrowding was common. Unlike most of the concentration camps within Germany not all of the transit camps were run by the SS. Camps could be run by local collaborators in the countries that they were based, such as Drancy, near Paris in France, which was run by the French Police until The Nazis started using forced labour shortly after their rise to power.
They established specific Arbeitslager labour camps which housed Ostarbeite r eastern workers , Fremdarbeiter foreign workers and other forced labourers who were forcibly rounded up and brought in from the east.
These were separate from the SS-run concentration camps, where prisoners were also forced to perform labour. The use of forced labour first began to grow significantly in , as rearmament caused labour shortages. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the use of labour again increased sharply. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June further heightened demands on the war economy, and in turn, for labour. At the same time, this invasion brought thousands of potential new workers under Nazi control.
These prisoners were called Ostarbeiter eastern workers and Fremdarbeiter foreign workers. The Nazis deported these people to forced labour camps, where they worked to produce supplies for the increasingly strained war economy or in construction efforts.
As in most Nazi camps, conditions in forced labour camps were inadequate. Inmates were only ever seen as temporary, and, in the Nazis view, could always be replaced with others: there was a complete disregard for the health of prisoners.
They were subject to insufficiencies of food, equipment, medicine and clothing, whilst working long hours.
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