Concentration Camps

servea printre altele și pentru pregătirea personalului SS în vederea administrării lagărelor de concentrare ce urmau să fie construite în viitor. Odată cu expansiunea nazistă în estul Europei, lagărele au căpătat o nouă destinație: implementarea politicilor rasiale ale naziștilor. Tot acum, este înființat și un Birou Economico - Administrativ principal, coordonat de SS, care se ocupa de repartizarea prizonierilor în diferite lagăre în funcție de finalitățile stabilite în concordanță cu obiectivele ideologice naziste: reeducare, muncă, tranzit, exterminare.

Bibliografie: Ancel, Jean, Preludiu la asasinat. Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941, Ed.Polirom, Iaşi, 2005 Arendt, Hannah, Originile totalitarismului, Ed. Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1994

Prof. Cazacu Camelia Constantin Gh Marinescu Secondary School Galați

In the first weeks after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the Nazis, whose government was based on decrees and provisions stemming from the "state of siege" declared after the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin, resorted to the extensive use of violence. it would soon become an important instrument of the Nazi state. Violence was the order of the day, both on the streets and in camps and prisons, where those who opposed the regime - communists, social democrats, liberals, some conservatives - or were considered a potential threat - criminals, homosexuals, prostitutes, vagrants, the unemployed, members of various religious sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic and Lutheran priests, were imprisoned, beaten, and sometimes killed. Since the mid-1930s, the Nazis have sought to exploit prisoners in the camps economically. The control exercised in Europe, especially after 1939, offered the Nazis a wide range of possibilities for the economic exploitation of the populations in those territories, especially those considered inferior from a racial point of view. Numerous forced labor camps were thus built that served agriculture, stone quarries, large enterprises in the chemical or war industry, camps in which thousands of prisoners died due to inhumane working conditions. The SS authorities even developed the concept of "extermination by labor", used especially in the case of Jewish prisoners. When objections were raised by Nazi officials after 1942 about the irrational "Final Solution", their only reference would be the rational use of the exploitation of the Jews to death, in order to obtain a final profit from them. Nazi concentration camps were established before World War II. Jews and "gypsies" were imprisoned in camps and subjected to brutal treatment because they belonged to another "race" whose existence "harmed" the "Aryan race". With the Nazi expansion in the East, the number of

prisoners increased considerably and thus there was a hierarchy within the camp, the Jews being on the last position in this hierarchy. The camps were used as a tool to establish the new racial order that the Germans had imposed on the East, which was part of a deliberate policy of eliminating the undesirables. A concrete first step in this regard was the incarceration of the gypsies in concentration camps, after they had previously been placed - since 1930 - in specially established communal camps. In 1942, a special camp for gypsies was created inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. After the outbreak of World War II, concentration camps began to be set up in the occupied territories. Especially in Eastern Europe, they soon became real tools for implementing terror. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners from all over Europe were imprisoned in a network of hundreds of camps, used to support the German war industry. The conditions in the camps were inhumane, thousands of prisoners died of starvation, hard labor and abuse, most often beatings by zealous guards. The Nazis also used the camps to implement their racial policies in the occupied territories, the prisoners in the camps being treated according to an extremely rigorous racial hierarchy. The camp system reached perfection with the opening of the Auschwitz Complex, which served as a concentration camp for Poles and other nationalities and an extermination camp for Jews, with more than 1,000,000 of them killed at Auschwitz - Birkenau. The Nazi camp system began with the establishment of the Dachau, the first official, permanent and organized concentration camp under the jurisdiction of the SS. Dachau was very different from the first camps. Built in March 1933, Dachau later served as a model for organizing the other camps in the Third Reich. The concentration camp system began to be developed after 1936, when new and much larger camps were created, where not only the political opponents of the regime were brought. A first such camp was the one in Sachsenhausen, which also served for the training of SS personnel in order to manage the concentration camps to be built in the future. With the Nazi expansion in Eastern Europe, the camps gained a new destination: the implementation of the racial policies of the Nazis. Also now, a main Economic-Administrative Bureau is established, coordinated by the SS, which deals with the distribution of prisoners in different camps according to the purposes established in accordance with Nazi ideological objectives: re-education, work, transit, extermination.

Bibliography: Ancel, Jean, Prelude to murder. Pogrom from Iaşi, June 29, 1941, Polirom Publishing House, Iaşi, 2005 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 1994