A Short History of the Nazi Concentration Camps [Partial Patreon Preview]

There is perhaps no better symbol of Nazi barbarism than the concentration camp.  It was here that victims not only lost their political rights (freedom of movement, right to due process, etc.), but where they were often stripped of their very humanity through torture, murder and other sadistic acts.  The camps, one could say, became a sort of hell on earth.How did this happen?  As the episode reveals, the camps were not initially intended to function this way; indeed, they were supposed to be a temporary solution encountered in building the Nazi dictatorship (a way to terrorize the Nazis' political opponents). But a combination of mission creep and the need for cheap labor drove their exponential growth, starting in the mid-1930s.  With the outbreak of war in 1939 they became even more essential to the German economy, reaching a peak of about 700,000 inmates in Jan. 1945.This partial patreon preview contains the introduction and the section on Nazi architecture and its relation to camp expansion.  To hear the full story, which includes the initial construction of the camps in 1933, the institutionalization of camp practices under Theodore Eicke in the early 1930s, the role played by Himmler and Heydrich in renewing large scale arrests, the impact of World War II and finally the liberation of the camps from late 1944-mid-1945, check out our Patreon site where you can get full access to this and other episodes for as little as $2/month (patreon.com/historyoffthepage).  Finally, one piece of errata: around the 15:00 mark it sounds like I refer to "Ravensbrück" concentration camp as "Ravensburg."  Its proper name is of course the former, not the latter.  Support the showFor more information on History Off the Page, check out our website www.historyoffthepage.com!   Or you can support the  show via Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/historyoffthepage?fan_landing=true.