The second volume in this series, “The Camp System,” presents students with a range of documents from prisoner registration cards and forced labor invoices to postwar survivor testimonies and hand-drawn maps. An introductory essay by Geoffrey P. Megargee, the editor of USHMM’s multi-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, provides students with a contextual overview of the vast and sprawling network of concentration camps, forced labor camps, transit camps, and killing centers operated by Nazi Germany.
The documents and images presented in this volume include survivor accounts as well as official German records, illustrating several different aspects and experiences of the camp system.
For example, a list of symbols created in 1941 for the use of the Schreibstube (registration office) at Buchenwald reveals the hierarchical nature of the racial categories and prisoner classifications used by Nazi authorities. This extensive list of symbols divided camp inmates into many different prisoner groups. Such markings, used on camp documents and sewn onto inmates’ camp uniforms, made the reasons for an individual’s incarceration instantly identifiable to authorities and served to separate and divide prisoner populations from one another. Privileges, rations, and labor assignments all depended heavily on the category (or categories) to which an inmate had been assigned, and so the chances of surviving internment in the camp system could be drastically affected by such labels.
Many of these prisoner categories combined different classifications, and a full third of this list was devoted to possible ways to categorize Jewish inmates. At the top of this list, for example, lies the term “Politischer Jude” (“Political Jew”), reflecting the Nazi practice of targeting Jews as both political and racial enemies.
Postwar testimonies from camp survivors form a rich part of the ITS collections, and the accounts included in this educational supplement provide details of the camp system’s intersections of persecution, forced labor, and mass murder. Multiple survivor accounts explain how prisoners were forced to work constructing new satellite camps and making armaments for the German war effort. These testimonies contain details of the terrible living conditions to which camp authorities subjected prisoners and demonstrate how thoroughly camp inmates’ forced labor had become integrated into the German economy.
One survivor’s correspondence includes a hand-drawn map of the Gross-Rosen subcamp at Friedland and a list of his fellow prisoners, while another document from a survivor of Buchenwald contains an annotated sketch of a horse stable that had been converted by camp authorities into a mass execution facility camouflaged to look like medical examination rooms. Because many survivors wrote to ITS after the war in order to receive the necessary documentation to file for reparations, the ITS digital archives contain many valuable early testimonies such as this.
The next supplement in this series will be “Roma and Sinti in the Holocaust,” which will be followed by another volume focusing on the experiences of Displaced Persons (DPs).
“The Camp System” can be downloaded for free via this link.
The first volume in this series, “Women under Nazi Persecution,” can be downloaded for free via this link.
Volumes I and II of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 can be downloaded from the USHMM website for free via this link. .