Since knowledgeable people continue to struggle with the notion that not all Nazi camps were concentration camps or, the reverse, that not all Nazi camps had gas chambers it shouldn't come as a surprise that the average person remains baffled by this issue. Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager or KL) imprisoned people without regard to legal guidelines or accepted norms of arrest. Among the more infamous were Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen (in Austria), Oranienburg, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück (for women). Until the Reichskristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, the camps were designed largely to provide protective custody for political prisoners: i.e., communists, socialists, trade-union leaders, and liberals. When war erupted in September 1939, there were about 25,000 prisoners in the concentration camp system. Concentration camps were horrible places; people were both tortured and murdered in them, and many inmates died of disease and malnutrition. But they were not designed for mass murder.

The extermination camps (Vernichtungslager, VL) were designed for one purpose: the blanket murder of Jews and other so-called racial undesirables. They were a product of Nazi ideology and the war, a product of the Third Reich conquering vast expanses of Eastern Europe inhabited by Jews. Indeed, all of the extermination camps were located in Eastern Europe, and the first such camp, Chelmno, did not become operational until December 8, 1941. Auschwitz, which has the most notorious reputation as an extermination camp, was actually a concentration camp; its nearby twin, Birkenau, did the mass killing. Between March 1942 and November 1944, 1.5 million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Why is this important? I recently read of a group of American tourists who, upon visiting Buchenwald, asked to be shown the location of the gas chambers. When told that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald, they were startled; throughout their adult lives they had associated all the camps with gas chambers. But the Nazis scrupulously carried out their program of Endlösung (Final Solution) not within Germany's borders but in territory inhabited largely by Poles. (One might note that Chelmno and Auschwitz were in Polish territory that had been incorporated into the Third Reich.) To be sure, the concentration camps were places of disease, brutality, and uncommon inhumanity -- witness conditions at Bergen-Belsen at the point of its liberation in April 1945. But they should not be confused with those facilities designed for systematic extermination.

---C. Paul Vincent