What Kind of Work Did They Do in the Death Camps?
The term "death camp" was coined in the 1940s to refer to concentration camps in the Nazi-occupied territory of Europe. Political prisoners and minorities were confined for punishment, torture, exploitation and death by the Nazi party. People placed in the camps were given numbers for identification instead of being identified as individuals. These camps were grim, bleak and full of misery.
Other People Are Reading
-
Types of Work
-
The work done in the death camps was hard, grueling labor. Types of work included working on farms to cultivate wheat and forced labor in nearby factories. The Nazis exploited the prisoners and had them do labor such as leveling ground, erecting buildings, building roads, digging ditches, crushing rocks, working in mills, factories, industrial plants and mills, digging coal, and producing chemicals and armaments.
The Laborers
-
"Russians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Dutch, Belgians, French, Italians, Spaniards and Serbs" worked in factories run by the Nazis, according to Jeane Dingell in a 1998 paper titled "Polish Forced Laborers." According to a survivor's account as told to Dingell, the Russians and Poles had to be marked with identification patches. Forced laborers included criminals, homosexuals, Gypsies, political prisoners, the mentally ill and children.
-
Working Conditions
-
The prisoners were given so little food that food is all they could think of. They were made to work for a minimum of 11 hours a day on low rations. Some of the prisoners were so overworked that they would go to bed and never wake up. The point of the camps was not only to have free labor but to work the prisoners until extermination.
Penalties and Executions
-
Those who were unfit to work were sent to extermination camps. Those who tried to escape were often hanged in public as a warning and sometimes there were mass executions. In these cases, the prisoners were made to stand in ditches before being shot. Some were even buried alive.
-
References
- Photo Credit Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images
