Read KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Online
Authors: Nikolaus Wachsmann
SS accommodation barracks in Neuengamme during the war: most regular guards lived regimented lives outside the barbed wire.
(KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme)
Slave labor for the war effort: directed by a civilian foreman, prisoners of the Farge satellite camp build a bombproof bunker for submarine production, circa 1944.
(Staatsarchiv Bremen, collection Schmidt)
Armaments Minister Albert Speer (center, right) and the Gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber (center, left), with prisoners of a satellite camp in Linz, 1944
(bpk/Hanns Hubmann)
Covert photograph taken by a German civilian from his kitchen window in Cologne in October 1943. The prisoners came from Buchenwald and belonged to an SS Building Brigade clearing bomb damage.
(NS-Dokumentationszentrum, Cologne)
A prisoner from the Dora satellite camp pushes a cart toward the entrance of the deep tunnel system that housed V2 rocket production, summer 1944.
(bpk/Hanns Hubmann)
The dismal “little camp” in Buchenwald, captured in a covert photograph by a French prisoner in June 1944. Inmates slept in tents (center) or windowless stables (left); designed for around fifty horses, the stables held up to two thousand men.
(Gedenkstätte Buchenwald)
Inside a hut at a Kaufering satellite camp (photographed after liberation). The SS crammed prisoners into such vermin-infested huts, which were covered with grass and earth.
(U.S. National Archives)
A 1944 self-portrait of the young German Jew Peter Edel by the Auschwitz gate, illustrating how the camp had changed him. The caption reads “Who is this?” — “You!” — “Me?” — “Yes!”
(State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)
A 1943 drawing by an unidentified Auschwitz prisoner depicting the powers and privileges of so-called Kapos
(State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim)
This covert photograph by a resident of a village on Lake Starnberg documents prisoners on a death march from Dachau on April 28, 1945.
(akg-images/Benno Gantner)
Prisoners in the Below forest in late April 1945, on a death march from the abandoned Sachsenhausen camp. In the foreground someone carries a Red Cross food parcel.
(ICRC, courtesy of Willy Pfister)
On April 30, 1945, a train with thousands of prisoners from the abandoned Leitmeritz satellite camp makes a stop in a Czech town, where locals defy the SS to distribute food and take pictures.
(Museum of Central Bohemia, Roztoky u Prahy)