How+is+a+Work+Camp+different+than+an+Extermination+Camp?

In June of 1941, we see a turning point in the war and in the concentration camps. The Nazi’s needed more tanks and more planes and more bombs. So the Nazi’s turned to the Concentration Camps. The camps were purposely transformed from “detention camps” into “slave-labor camps”. They started emptying more and more people into the camps to work. The focus of the camps now was no longer political, it was for economic purposes. “The war has brought a manifest change in the structure of the concentration camps along with a fundamental change in their mission…. The detention of prisoners is no longer for reasons of security, correction, and prevention is no longer the first priority. The center of gravity has shifted to the economic side. The mobilization of the labor power of all internees primarily for war tasks (increase of armaments) must take absolute precedence,” says General Oswald Pohl, chief of the SS Central Economic and Administrative Office.

The final solution came at the Wannsee Conference. Their “final solution” was to subject the Jews to forced labor and work them to death. Those not killed by the amount of work would need to be accorded “appropriate treatment” which means they would need to be killed some other way. The way the camp personal acted is what kept the labor camps functioning as death camps. They worked twelve hour shifts, six days a week. The camp personal understood their job to work prisoners until they died of “natural casues” such as exposure to the elements, undernourishment, disease, or physical weakness. The personal kicked and beat the inmates into working harder and faster. They gave them impossible tasks to perform and whipped them when they were not completed. In Mauthausen, barefoot prisoners carried sixty pound stones up 168 rocky steps to the top of the quarry. These steps were called the “steps of death” because they were some three hundred feet to the top of the quarry and they mostly fell along the way.

Death was everywhere in these camps. If one inmate tried to escape twenty five would be killed to keep others from attempting to escape. This death toll rise in the camps gave way to new concentration camp industry, The Death Brigade. The mass killings they had required no thoughts they just threw the bodies in pits. They started running out of room and they started burning the corpses. In 1940, the labor camps now became official death camps when the first crematoriums were installed. (The Holocaust Camps)

For even more information about Forced Labor see this following link. [|http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005180] By Anna