Nazi concentration camps
Prior to and during World War II, Nazi Germany under Hitler maintained concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, abbreviated KZ or KL) throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps were greatly expanded in Germany after the Reichstag fire in 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime. They grew rapidly through the 1930s as political opponents and many other groups of people were incarcerated without trial or judicial process. The term was borrowed from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War. Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps (described in a separate article), which were camps established for the sole purpose of carrying out the extermination of the Jews of Europe—the Final Solution. Extermination camps included Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
