A concentration camp is where prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and political prisoners are detained and confined, typically in harsh conditions or in locations or situations characterized by extremely harsh conditions. The first concentration camps were established in 1933 to confine opponents of the Nazi party. The supposed opposition soon included all Jews, Gypsies, and some other groups. In 1939 there were six camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenburg and Ravensbruck. AuschwitzAuschwitz, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, is the best known of all the Nazi extermination camps, although Auschwitz was only one of six extermination camps. It was also a labor concentration camp, from which it extracted the value of prisoners, in the form of forced labor, for weeks or months. Auschwitz was the end of the line for millions of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and other innocents. Some spend almost two years in this infamous concentration camp. The average prisoner survived only eight weeks in Auschwitz. Some learned the ins and outs of surviving Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the largest concentration and extermination camp built in the Third Reich. Located 37 miles west of Krakow, Poland, Auschwitz hosted the largest number of forced laborers and deaths. The history of the camp began on April 27, 1940 when Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo, ordered the construction of the camp in northeastern Silesia, a region conquered by the Nazis in September 1939. The camp was built by three hundred Jewish prisoners from the local town of Oswiecim and its surroundings. In June 1940 the camp was opened for Polish political prisoners. In 1941 there were around 11,000 prisoners, most of them Polish. From May 1940 to the end of 1943 Rudolf Hess was commander-in-chief of Auschwitz. Under his leadership, Auschwitz quickly became known as the Nazi regime's harshest prison camp. Polish prisoners were forced to stand at attention for hours on end naked in the cold, snowy tundra of the Polish winter. After its first year of existence, Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz and told Hess that its workforce would be expanded to 100,000 prisoners, making it one of the largest concentration camps. To accommodate so many people, a second, much larger, section of Auschwitz (Auschwit... center of card... like chambers built in nearby Hartheim Castle. Forced labor in the SS Stone Works and Messerschmidt aircraft factory. 120,000 people killed.Ravensbruck: Created May 15, 1939. First commander: Max Koegel Siemens Corporation. Sachsenhausen: Created April 23, 1936. First commander: Herman Baranowski 35,000 inmates maximum 135,000 people passed through the camp. political prisoners, homosexuals, draft dodgers, etc. Contained gas chamber and crematorium. Used for mass murder of 11,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Forced labor for Heinkel planes. Total deaths of 30 to 35,000. it functioned as a homicidal gas chamber and incineration plant from March 15, 1943, before its official entry into service on March 31, until November 27, 1944, annihilating a total of approximately 400,000 people. Most of whom were Jewish women, children and elderly people. Crematorium III: was used in a similar manner from 25 June 1943 to 27 November 1944, killing approximately 350,000 victims.