Britannica Sources used in this answer

How did extermination camps differ from concentration camps?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Nazi SS troops march in formation carrying banners with swastikas and eagles at the 1933 Party Day rally in Nuremberg, Germany, with trees in the background. — Third Reich A Nazi Party rally at Nürnberg, Germany, in 1933.

While both were part of the Nazi system of terror, concentration camps and extermination camps served fundamentally different primary purposes within the Third Reich.

Concentration Camps
Established as early as 1933, concentration camps functioned primarily as internment centers for political opponents, such as Communists and Social Democrats, and later for various minority groups. These camps were used for confinement, punishment, and forced labor, where inmates were often worked to death or died from starvation and disease.12

Extermination Camps
In contrast, extermination camps—or "death camps"—were specialized facilities designed for the industrial-scale, systematic murder of human beings, primarily as part of the Holocaust and the "final solution." While some sites like Auschwitz and Majdanek functioned as both slave-labor centers and killing centers, others like Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor were devoted solely to mass annihilation.34

The creation of extermination camps represented a shift in Nazi policy to move away from mobile killing units toward stationary centers where victims were transported by rail and murdered efficiently using poison gas.34