KZ
Dachau was the first concentration camp established in Nazi Germany - the camp was opened on March 22,
1933. The camp's first inmates were primarily political prisoners,
Social Democrats, Communists, trade unionists,
habitual criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, beggars, vagrants, hawkers.
In the late 1930's the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal
injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in
June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began
shooting massive numbers of Jews and Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the
outskirts of conquered cities and towns.
Eventually the Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing. Extermination centers were established in occupied Poland with
special apparatus especially designed for mass murder. Giant death machines.
Six such death camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno,
Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Large-scale
murder by gas and body disposal through cremation were conducted systematically.
Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos
in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established. In addition, millions died in
the ghettos and concentration camps as a result of forced labor, starvation,
exposure, brutality, disease, and execution.
