Concentration camp Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Concentration camp - Essay Example The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum report on concentration camps reveals that â€Å"Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims† (Nazi). The concentration camps of Nazi Germany were designed in various forms and did not all engage in the same type of activities. The first camp that was created in Nazi Germany was opened two months after Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933. The camp, called Dachau, was considered a triumph for the German people because the people were in need of order in their country (Bergen). This camp was considered a solution to the chaos that had previously existed. In bringing order to Germany, Hitler imprisoned political prisoners, who were communists, social democrats, or anyone who was against Hitler’s authority. Some of the prisoners were brutal convicts from traditional prisons who were given the power over other prisoners in order to make the job of the camp guards an easier task (Bergan). As the first prison, Dachau would be the experiment off of which the rest of the camps would then be tailored to fit the needs that the camp would be built to fulfill. According to Harold Marcuse, in his book, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp-2001 , â€Å"During the first weeks of the camp’s operation, the prisoners were not humiliated or mistreated, their heads were not shaved, they were not identified by numbers, and they were not forced to work† (22). However, the treatment would change in the months that followed. Marcuse states that by May of 1933, special rules had been put into place, and that â€Å"violence and terror were institutionalized as part of life in the camps† (22). By the end of May, records show that 12 prisoners had been killed or tortured to death (Marcuse 22). Dachau was becoming a template for the horrors that would follow in the various camps that would be built . After 1940, the