Top 3 major concentration camps.

BIRKENAU was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. It was very secure. No one ever could escape. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich. I remember the barracks were the worst at this camp. It was very tight,wet, and it smelled like death. The majority,probably about 90%,of the victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp died in Birkenau. This means approximately a million people.

AUSCHWITZ, the main camp, was the first camp established near Oswiecim. Construction began in April 1940 in an abandoned Polish army barracks in a suburb of the city. SS authorities continuously used prisoners for forced labor to expand the camp. During the first year of the camp’s existence, the SS and police cleared a zone of approximately 40 square kilometers (15.44 square miles) as a “development zone” reserved for the exclusive use of the camp. Like some concentration camps, Auschwitz I had a gas chamber and crematorium.It was very scary being in this camp. I woke up every day wondering if today was the day that I would die. Initially, SS engineers constructed an improvised gas chamber in the basement of the prison block, Block 11. Later a larger, permanent gas chamber was constructed as part of the original crematorium in a separate building outside the prisoner compound.

BUCHENWALD was constructed in 1937 in a wooded area on the northern slopes of the Ettersberg, about five miles northwest of Weimar in east-central Germany. Before the Nazi takeover of power, Weimar was known as the home of leading literary figure Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a product of German liberal tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also known as the birthplace of German constitutional democracy in 1919, the Weimar Republic. During the Nazi regime, "Weimar" became associated with the Buchenwald concentration camp. At Buchenwald, I felt like I died and went to hell. It was awfull.