All events · The World Wars

The Nazi Concentration Camp System before the War

1933–1939 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Confinement

Confined

200,000

At least 100 early camps and detention sites were opened across Germany in 1933, holding roughly 45,000 to 50,000 people in that year alone under 'protective detention'. After consolidation under the SS the system comprised six main camps by 1939 - Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbuerg, Mauthausen and Ravensbrueck - with a prisoner population of about 21,000 in the summer of 1939. Cumulatively, on the order of 200,000 people passed through the prewar camps, including some 30,000 Jewish men arrested after Kristallnacht in November 1938. The figures come from the camp administrations' own records and from the Museum's encyclopedia of camps and ghettos.

Share of the population affected

0.29%

of the population of Germany within its 1937 borders on the eve of the war, 1939

Killed

5,000–15,000

deaths in transit or in camps

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What happened

Detention camps appeared in Germany within weeks of Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933, initially run by the SA, the police and local authorities to hold communists, social democrats and trade unionists under 'protective detention' outside any court process. Dachau, opened in March 1933, became the model for a system that Heinrich Himmler consolidated under the SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. From 1936 the categories of prisoner widened to include Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexual men, repeat offenders and people labelled 'asocial', held for indefinite terms and marked with coloured triangles. Camps were sited to exploit prisoner labour in SS-owned quarries and brickworks. After the annexation of Austria and Kristallnacht in 1938 tens of thousands of Jewish men were seized and held for weeks or months, most being released on condition that they emigrate. The prewar system established the legal void, the labour regime and the personnel on which the wartime camps and killing centres were built.

Parties

The SS and German police held political opponents, and then people classified as social, racial and religious undesirables, in camps outside judicial control

The denominator

The May 1939 census counted about 69.3 million people in the Altreich and 79.4 million in the Greater German Reich including Austria and the Sudetenland. The pre-war camps drew from specific targeted groups within that population — Communists and Social Democrats, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, Roma, homosexual men and people classed as 'asocial' — rather than from the population at large.

Where the baseline comes from

Nazi concentration camps — Wikipediaopen-edited
Demographics of Germany — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Deaths in the prewar camps ran to several thousand, from beatings, shootings 'while attempting escape', suicide and disease; there was no systematic killing programme before the war. Camp death registers are incomplete and the range reflects differing treatment of deaths shortly after release.

Documented forms of violence

Arbitrary DetentionTortureForced LabourSummary Execution

Detention without judicial process, systematic beatings and punishment regimes, forced labour in SS enterprises and killings in custody are documented in camp records, Gestapo files and survivor testimony summarised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Germany