AUSCHWITZ/BIRKENAU

Auschwitz/Birkenau is located in Oswiecim.

Establishment Date: May 4 1940.------------------- Liberation Date: January 27 1945.

About 1 ¼ million people were killed at Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was built for three main reasons.

1) to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime and the German occupation authorities in Poland for an indefinite period of time;

2) To have available a supply of forced laborers for deployment in SS-owned, construction-related enterprises

3) To serve as a site to physically eliminate small, targeted groups of the population whose death was determined by the SS and police authorities to be essential to the security of Nazi Germany.

-Facts ! -Auschwitz included three main camps, all

of which imprisoned Jews at forced labor. -One of them also functioned for an

extended period as a killing center. -Auschwitz-Birkenau and Auschwitz-

Monowitz would become independent concentration camps

- Construction for Auschwitz 1 began in May 1940

Bergen-Belsen

Located in south of the small towns of Bergen and Belsen, about 11 miles north of Celle, Germany.

German military authorities established the Bergen-Belsen camp in May 1940.

-------------------- Liberated in

April 15, 1945. These are children survivors that were liberated in Bergen-Belsen.

37,000 prisoners died in this camp

Until 1943, Bergen-Belsen was exclusively a prisoner-of-war camp. In April 1943 the SS Economic-Administration Main Office which administered the concentration camp system, took over a portion of Bergen-Belsen and converted it first into a civilian residence camp and, later, into a concentration camp.

-Facts! -Bergen-Belsen was built in 1943 as a

prison camp and a Jewish slave work camp. It was meant for 10,000 people

-It ended up holding 41,000.-It did not have any gas chambers. Many

died though. -People died from diseases or just being

over worked. Anne Frank died there.

WESTERBORK

The Westerbork camp was located in the northeastern part of the Netherlands in the Dutch province of Drenthe, near the towns of Westerbork and Assen.

The Dutch government established a camp at Westerbork in October 1939

----------------------------------Liberation date: April 12, 1944

101,000 Dutch Jews and about 30,000 German Jews were deported to their deaths in Poland. In addition, there were about 400 Gypsies in the camp and, at the very end of the War, some 400 women.

The camp was made to imprison Jewish refugees who had escaped to the Netherlands illegally. It was a deportation camp.

-Facts! - The Westerbork camp had a "double life."

While most inmates stayed in the camp for only short periods of time before being deported, there was also a "permanent" camp population of 2,000 people, mostly German Jews.

- In the end most of the "permanent" inmates were also sent to the concentration camps and death camps.

-Westerbork was liberated by Canadian Forces

Drancy

Located in Paris, France

Establishment Date: 1940

--------------------Liberation Date:

August 17, 1944

This camp was made to hold Jews who were later deported to the extermination camps. 65,000 Jews were deported from Drancy.

About 63,000 were murdered, including 6,000 children. Only 2,000 remained alive.

Facts!-Drancy Camp was only designed to hold

700 people. -Children were immediately separated from

their parents- 3,000 survived in this camp

Chelmno

The village of Chelmno is located about 30 miles northwest of Lodz, Poland

Establishment Date: December 1941

------------------Liberation Date: March 1943. Later the camp reopened in June 1944 for two months.

SS and police killed at least 152,000 people in Chelmno.

SS and police authorities established the Chelmno killing center in order to annihilate the Jewish population.

Facts!-One and a half million Jewish children died

in the Holocaust.-Most children who had survived were

adolescents and the majority of them were boys.

-Chelmno was a extermination camp. -This camp killed most of the people with

poisonous gas.

Bibliography

http://isurvived.org/AUSCHWITZ_TheCamp.html

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/BergenBelsen/BergenBelsen05.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0210520/concentration_camps.htm

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005217