abstract
| - Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (in German Konzentrationslager, or KZ) throughout the territories it controlled. The term was borrowed from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War. The first Nazi concentration camps were hastily erected in Germany in February 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor and his NSDAP was given control over the police through Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Prussian Acting Interior Minister Hermann Göring. Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps held around 45,000 prisoners by 1933 and were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of that year. Only about 3,000 inmates remained in the camps when in 1934–35 Heinrich Himmler's SS took full control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany. It was then that Adolf Hitler allowed Himmler to start using the camps' facilities and personnel to purge German society of so-called "racially undesirable elements" such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Romani people. Between 1939 and 1942 during World War II, the number of camps exploded to more than 300, as political prisoners and "undesirable elements" from across Europe were mass-incarcerated generally without judicial process. The concentration camps were administered since 1934 by Concentration Camps Inspectorate which in 1942 was merged into SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and were guarded by SS-Totenkopfverbände. Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps, which were established by the Nazis for the industrial-scale mass murder of the predominantly Jewish ghetto and concentration camp populations.
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