During the year 2020 most Western European governments have been commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Nazi death camps liberation. Names such as Mauthausen-Gusen, Treblinka, Auschwitz or Ravensbrück became the clearest mirror of holocaust and genocide. Nazi Germany maintained Konzentrationslager, KL or KZ throughout the territories it controlled before and during the Second World War. The first Nazi camps were erected in Germany in March 1933 immediately after Hitler became Chancellor. Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps initially held around 45,000 prisoners. In 1933–1939, before the onset of war, most prisoners consisted of German Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and people accused of ‘asocial’ or socially ‘deviant’ behaviour by the Germans.
Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) took full control of the police and the concentration camps throughout Germany. The role of the camps expanded to hold so-called “undesirables” such as Jews. The number of people in the camps grew to 21,000 by the start of World War II and peaked at 715,000 in January 1945.
Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps and extermination camps, which were established by Nazi Germany for the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews in the ghettos by way of gas chambers.
Likewise, in this frame of activities to honour those people who suffered the worst genocide in history, some students took part in a literary competition organised by the DEMD-EBRE (a group of teachers who are working on historical memory). They wrote very good stories, most of which related to historical facts, which we can read in the following online magazine.
