12—Extermination and concentration camps.

From Hitler's rise to power in 1933 until the end of the war, the Nazis set up 44,000 different camps and killed more than 6 million people, mostly Jews.

These camps were used for a variety of purposes. From labour camps, to concentration camps, to extermination camps. The extermination camps, unlike the other camps, were technically adapted for mass murder - they included gas chambers and crematoria. At first, exhaust fumes from the engines were used for the killings, with the dying process lasting approximately 15 minutes. Later, cyclone B, which was more efficient and faster, also replaced the poison gas fumes from the engines. It was first used by the Nazis in 1942 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on Soviet and Polish prisoners of war.

The first prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were Germans labeled as politically unreliable because they criticized Hitler's policies.

Indeed, totalitarian regimes do not only aim at the destruction of their external enemy, but also proclaim a "cleansing" of their internal structures. In the spirit of Nazi ideology, not every German was an "Aryan" and thus worthy of life. Germans with psychiatric illness or LGBT people (especially homosexual men) were also labeled as "subhuman." In the camp, they were distinguished by simple symbols - political prisoners, for example, wore a patch in the shape of a red triangle, the LGBT pink triangle, which is still one of the symbols used by LGBT activists to this day.

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Lining up for selection

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Marking of prisoners in a concentration camp

However, just as in the Nazi Third Reich, so in its satellite, the Slovak State, the Nazi worldview was that it was necessary to get rid not only of the Jewish minority, but also of the Roma minority, for racial reasons. It is estimated that approximately 220 000 Roma perished in the largest extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Roma use the word porajmos (destruction) to refer to the Roma Holocaust. Mass deportations of Roma from the territory of Slovakia were not carried out.

More about the genocide of the Roma population here.

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Bergen-Belsen

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Buchenwald

The main victims were the Jews. Hitler's goal was to murder all 11 million European Jews from Britain to the Urals. Two thirds of Europe's Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. They died not only in the gas chambers of the extermination camps, but also by mass executions, extremely cruel treatment, starvation, disease and exhaustion. 

Hitler's goal was to murder all 11 million European Jews from Britain to the Urals. Two thirds of Europe's Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

In April 1944, two Slovaks, 20-year-old Rudolf Vrba from Topoľčany and six years older Alfréd Wetzler from Trnava, managed to escape from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and inform the world about what was happening in the camps. Their account of the mass murder of Jews was broadcast by the BBC and published by the Western press and is considered one of the most important documents of the 20th century.

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Bodies in a concentration camp

AN EXCERPT FROM THE REPORT
OF VRBA AND WETZLER

Available here.

"In principle, only Jews were gassed; Aryans were very rarely gassed, as they are usually given over to 'special treatment by shooting. (...) At the commissioning of the first crematorium in early March 1943 - 8,000 Jews from Kraków were gassed and burned for the occasion - prominent guests from Berlin, high-ranking officers and civilians, were present. They were very satisfied with the performance of the facility and took turns diligently at the porthole in the gas chamber door. They spared no praise for this new facility.
(...) The gassing is done by taking people to Hall B, where the guards tell them they are going to take a bath. They have to undress and, in order to leave them in no doubt that they are really going to take a bath, they are each given a towel and a bar of soap by two men dressed in white coats. They are then crammed into gas chamber C. Two thousand people fill this chamber so that they can only stand upright. The guards will fire shots into the air to give those already in the chamber a bit of a shove, thus allowing the others to get in as well. As soon as everyone is inside, the guards close the heavy door. There is a moment's wait, apparently to allow the temperature in the chamber to rise to a certain degree. Then the SS men with gas masks on their faces go up to the roof, open the window sashes, and pour some powdered agent into the chamber from cans. On the cans is written "Zyklon", intended for "pest control" - it is produced by a certain Hamburg factory. We presume that it is a cyanide preparation, which at a certain temperature turns into a gas. After three minutes, everything in the chamber is dead. So far there has not been a single instance when the chamber has been opened in which any signs of life have been perceived, which was not uncommon in the primitive gassing in the Birch Forest."