Concentration camp: Quick Facts

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Facts

Also Known As	internment camp

Photos and Videos

Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

concentration camp

Map of the western and central United States during 1942-46, showing the exclusion area along the West Coast in pink where Japanese Americans were forcibly removed. Red stars indicate the locations of the ten internment camps: Tule Lake, Manzanar, Poston, Gila River, Minidoka, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Granada, Rohwer, and Jerome.

Deportation of Jewish children to Chelmno

Auschwitz; concentration camp

Map showing the locations of major Nazi camps in 1944 across Greater Germany and occupied territories during World War II. Hundreds of yellow dots mark camp sites densely distributed within the borders of Germany, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the General Government area, with surrounding countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovakia, and Hungary labeled for context.

Rows of empty wooden bunk beds line both sides of a long, narrow barracks building at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Japanese American internment: children

Forced labor in Nazi Germany during World War II

The horror of Auschwitz: A journey through history

How much did Germans know about the Holocaust?

History and role of the SS in Nazi Germany

Witness the horrors of the Holocaust committed in Nazi concentration camps as Allied forces liberate survivors

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Topics

extermination camp imprisonment The Legacy of Order 9066 and Japanese American Internment What Was Life Like in Japanese American Internment Camps?

Key People

Portrait of Adolf Hitler in a collared shirt and tie, facing forward with a serious expression, circa 1933.

Adolf Hitler

dictator of Germany

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler

German Nazi leader

Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich

German Nazi official

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Karl Otto Koch

German Nazi commandant

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Rudolf Franz Höss

German Nazi commandant

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Varlam Shalamov

Russian author