ABSTRACT
The Nazi concentration camp system, which consisted of hundreds of camps across Europe, was used for a variety of functions: incarceration, forced labor, and extermination (and as assembly camps for eventual extermination elsewhere).1 Some camps, like the infamous one at Auschwitz, consisted of numerous subcamps.2 The system was run by the SS, and in 1942 the camps were incorporated into the SS’s EconomicAdministrative Main Offi ce, the division that ran a vast array of SS business enterprises that relied on inmate slave labor. These businesses included companies involved in armaments, building materials, furniture, textiles, leather, fi shing, shale oil, printing, foodstuff s, and mineral water.3 Initially the Nazis used the concentration camps to incarcerate their political adversaries in Germany (e.g., Communists, leftists, trade unionists, oppositional church leaders). Next they sent so-called asocial elements (e.g., vagrants, beggars, criminals with prior convictions). After the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938, the camps were increasingly used for dealing with the “Jewish problem,” and once the Final Solution was underway in 1942, the extermination function of the camps became more central to their operation. Moderówka, the camp that my father was sent to in September 1942, was still a work camp, which he said was “the easiest camp to bear” among all the camps he subsequently experienced.
