Here, the SS killed some one million Jews most were murdered on arrival in gas chambers. Still, the single most lethal site of the Holocaust was a concentration camp: Auschwitz.

Most of the six million European Jews murdered by the Nazis died outside concentration camps, shot or gassed on the killing fields of eastern Europe. Many more were executed or died during horrific medical experiments.įrom 1942, the camps participated in the Holocaust. Many inmates died from illness and starvation. Conditions inside camps, always poor, now became deadly. Auschwitz, set up in 1940 to crush the Polish resistance, was the first of many new camps. When war broke out in autumn 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, this SS system included six purpose-built camps holding 21,400 prisoners.ĭuring the Second World War, concentration camps spread through much of Nazi-occupied Europe. And so Hitler supported the creation of a permanent concentration camp system under SS leader Heinrich Himmler.

But Adolf Hitler wanted to keep the camps: he saw the benefits of lawless terror, without courts and judges.

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