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Documented History The Bergen-Belsen Camp started out in the 1930s as a construction worker’s camp for a nearby military training ground of the German armed forces. After World War Two broke out, the camp was repurposed and expanded as a PoW camp. In April 1943, several sections of this camp were taken over by the…
No historian has ever claimed or is currently claiming that any kind of systematic extermination of inmates by any technical means occurred at the Buchenwald Camp. Therefore, this camp would not have a place in an encyclopedia on the Holocaust, if it weren’t for some witnesses having made claims to the contrary, and if the…
Stephen Pinter, the U.S. chief investigator preparing the prosecution against former staff members of the Flossenbürg Camp after the war, came to the conclusion that no homicidal gas chamber ever existed at that camp. Today, all historians agree with that conclusion. That didn’t stop former inmates from making gas-chamber claims, though, as it was fashionable…
When the Mauthausen Camp became overcrowded in 1939, subcamps were established to house inmates near to their worksites. Eventually, three such camps near the creek Gusen were established, named Gusen I through III. Of particular interest for Holocaust historiography is the cremation furnace established at the Gusen I Camp, which was almost identical to the…
In mid-October 1941, a camp was set up at Janowska Road in Lviv to house transports of Austrian and Czech Jews deported for resettlement to the east. It was to serve as a transit as well as forced-labor camp, and started operating in November of that year. Its relevance for the Holocaust starts in the…
The Klooga Labor Camp was a satellite camp of the Vaivara Camp in northern Estonia. It was set up in the summer of 1943, and at its peak housed up to 3,000 Jewish men and women, mainly from the Vilnius and Kaunas Ghettos. Toward the end of the German rule in this area, most inmates…
At the military training ground near the German town of Ohrdruf, a forced-labor camp was established in November 1944. Due to Germany’s rapid collapse at that time, the camp never had a chance of developing any proper infrastructure. Therefore, living conditions were atrocious, death rates catastrophic. As U.S. troops approached, the camp was evacuated to…
Oranienburg is a town north-northwest of Berlin. It was the location of a small prison facility functioning as a concentration camp between March 1933 and summer 1934, when it was dissolved. A new camp on the town’s outskirts, called Sachsenhausen, was established in 1936. Since 1938, Oranienburg was also the seat of the SS’s Concentration…
Rajsko is a village some 5 miles southwest of the city of Auschwitz. Most of its population was deported/resettled in 1941/42. The Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS established its “Sanitary and Bacteriological Testing Station Southeast” there in 1943 (“Hygienisch-bakteriologische Untersuchungsstelle Südost der Waffen-SS”). It served primarily to conduct experiments on a number of vaccines…
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