Concentration vs Extermination Camps During Nazi Germany.

Or how some people still confuse the two and come to some wrong conclusions about Germans.

Source: www.History.com. The liberation of Dachau, one of the very first concentration camps, near Munich.

The confusion between concentration camps and extermination camps continues to this day. Especially in the minds of the Western Allies (US and UK) and their now living descendants. This confusion causes some people to come to wrong conclusions and therefore, to make mistakes. I’ll try to explain why.

This article is built in chronological order so as to make one understand how the Holocaust happened and how the situation in 1934 was different from the one in 1936, and the one in 1938, the one in 1940, the one in 1943, and especially the one in 1945. In other words, the history of both the concentration camps and the Holocaust is not a static situation and, although at many places the two are intertwined and even overlapping, they are very distinct phenomena.

Here we go.

As soon as the Nazis (short for “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” or National-Socialist German Workers Party) came to power, the SA, Hitler’s brown-shirted party police — in fact a bunch of unemployed and in-need-of-an-activity thugs — started to round up their traditional opponents and bring them to special re-education camps. Without due…