Extermination camp (death camp)

Design, methods and conditions

These camps were organized to expedite killing at industrial scale. The main technical methods included the use of poison substances and gas delivered into sealed gas chambers, but mass killing also occurred through mass executions such as systematic shooting, and through policies that produced death by neglect. Administrators sometimes described or rationalized conditions as "extermination through work," commonly called extermination through labor, where prisoners were forced into backbreaking forced labor while essential needs like adequate food and medical care were withheld.

Who were the victims?

The principal targets of the Nazi extermination program were Jews; a very large share of those killed in the camps were Jewish men, women and children. The broader Nazi plan to annihilate European Jewry was called the Final Solution and the genocide is commonly known as the Holocaust. Other groups were also persecuted and killed in these facilities, including Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, political opponents, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and others deemed undesirable by Nazi ideology.

Examples and geography

The best-known complex was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which combined forced-labour camps with facilities designed for mass killing; other major Nazi extermination camps included Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek. Methods of death inside and near the camps also included deliberate starvation, exposure and even freezing to death in harsh conditions. In parts of occupied Europe, collaborators and local regimes also established killing sites. For example, the fascist Ustaše government in the Independent State of Croatia ran camps such as Jasenovac, where Serbs, Jews, Roma and others were killed; estimates of victims at such sites vary and are the subject of historical research and debate, including the fate of many Serbs.

How extermination camps fit into wider persecution

Extermination camps differed from concentration, transit and labor camps by having killing as their primary function rather than detention or exploitation alone. Often prisoners arrived by train, underwent selection, and those deemed unfit for work were sent immediately to killing facilities. Others were kept alive only to provide forced labor until they died from brutality, disease or exhaustion. The combination of direct execution, mechanical killing devices and systemic neglect made these camps central to state-sponsored mass murder.

Aftermath, memory and distinction

After the war, the camps became central subjects of war crimes trials, documentation projects and memorialization. Survivors, liberators and investigators recorded evidence that established how systematic the killing programs were. Today extermination camps are studied in history, law and ethics as paradigmatic examples of genocide and crimes against humanity. Museums and memorials preserve sites and testimony so that the facts, causes and human consequences remain part of public memory and education.

• Key technical methods: gas, gas chambers, shootings and deliberate neglect.
• Key concepts: Final Solution, Holocaust, extermination through labor.
• Historical actors and sites: Nazi Germany, Independent State of Croatia, Jasenovac.