Rare color photographs document everyday life in the first Nazi concentration camps in 1933.
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps in all the territories it controlled before and during World War II. The first Nazi camps were established in Germany in March 1933, immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) gained control of the police through Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and the incumbent Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring. The camps served to imprison and torture political opponents and trade union organizers and initially housed around 45,000 prisoners.
In 1934/35, Heinrich Himmler’s SS assumed complete control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany. Himmler expanded the camps’ purpose to include the imprisonment of so-called “racially undesirable elements” of German society, such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Roma. The number of people in the camps, which had fallen to 7,500, rose again to 21,000 by the beginning of World War II and reached its peak of 715,000 in January 1945.
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