Military History

As the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau set the tone for all subsequent facilities of this type. The rationale for the establishment of the camp followed the suspension of the German democratic constitution on 28 February 1933, with the ensuing "protective custody" measures against all critics of the Nazi regime.

Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany operated from 1937 to 1945, during which tens of thousands of inmates were put to death by the SS-Schutzstaffel, including several thousand Soviet POWs and several Allied intelligence officers.

In April 1945, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp complex near Hanover, Germany. The contents of the "Horror Camp" shocked and disgusted hardened soldiers and medics alike. Because of extensive British film and press coverage of conditions in the camp, it was held up as a symbol of the cruelty of the Nazi regime and pro...

One of the most notorious atrocities committed against POWs in the Pacific theater of World War II, the Bataan Death March took American and Filipino troops to prison camps in the northern Philippines after they surrendered to the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula on 9 April 1942. As a result of their three-month defense of the peninsula, America...

Officially designated Stalag 8B, Lamsdorf was one of the largest and most disliked German POW camps of World War II. In a bleak part of Upper Silesia near the site of a POW camp built in 1915 to hold British and Russian prisoners, Lamsdorf was opened in the summer of 1940 to accommodate over 5,000 British army POWs captured during the Battle of ...

Stalag Luft 3, near the town of Sagan in the German province of Silesia, became the largest and most famous prison camp for Allied airmen in World War II. It was opened in April 1942, after the Luftwaffe decided that all captured airmen should be confined in a single camp. In its original incarnation, Stalag Luft 3 comprised two compounds: East,...

During World War II, the German army established work detachments, or Arbeitskommandos, to detain prisoners of war who were put to work in factories, farms, mines, and other industries. Under the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention (Articles 27 to 34), countries at war were permitted to utilize the labor of prisoners of war so long as that labor...

Auschwitz (in German) or Oświęcim (in Polish) was the largest and most notorious German concentration camp during World War II. It was one of the so called combined camps (concentration and extermination camp) like the Majdanek concentration camp. Originally built as a military barracks, Auschwitz I received its first prisoners in June 1940 with...