craig stennett

This is Buchenwald Concentration Camp.The largest of the concentration camps within Germany. Housing the mentally ill and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people, Homosexuals, Freemasons, and prisoners of war, Jews. Poles and other Slavs. However, Buchenwald was not an extermination camp.

In Gitta Sereny‘s 1970‘s book- 'Into That Darkness'-she points out that; 'The concentration camps had gas-vans, gas chambers, crematoriums and mass graves, and apart from being murdered, hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion, starvation and disease........there was in all of them a chance of life.'

The Extermination camps were different. There are only 4 Chelmno was the first( December 1941), Belsec (March 1942), Sobibor (May 1942) and the largest Treblinka (June 1942) all of them build in Poland. 

Gitta Seeny: 'These camps were created with the sole purpose of of exterminating primarily the Jews of Europe, and also the Gypsies... None of the extermination Camps existed for longer than 17 months when, one after the other, they were totally obliterated by the SS.' The Polish Government conservatively approximated that during that time period these 4 camps killed 2 million Jews and 52 Thousand Gypsies ( with children making up at least one third of the totals.)