Glossary Term: Concentration Camp

Detention centres established from March 1933 in the Reich territory and later in the occupied territories, initially for opponents of the Nazi regime, whose daily life was marked by arbitrary violence and terror. The Gestapo was responsible for the internment of concentration camp inmates, using the instrument of so-called protective custody. The inmate community was subject to an internal camp hierarchy and was increasingly used for forced labour in the German armaments industry from 1942 onwards. Thousands of inmates fell victim to the Nazi programme of “extermination through labour.”