The Nazi Concentration Camp System
Author: Marie Pierson
Date created: 04/11/2011 11:27 AM EDT ; Date modified: 04/12/2011 5:56 PM EDT
Basic Information
Mentor Teacher
Dr. David Saxe
Grade/Level
Grade 11
Time Frame
60 minutes
Subject(s)
History
Lesson Topic
Nazi Concentration Camp System
Generally, this lesson is about the development of the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany. I want my students to
know the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp. In addition, my students will know the
general categories of people placed in the camps by the Nazis, the year in which the camp system was formalized, that
Dachau served as the model concentration camp, and that around 11 million people perished in these camps. I want my
students to be able to distinguish between the locations of concentration camps and those of extermination camps and
develop two reasons as to why their geographic locations differed. For this lesson, I am going to provide students with a
handout on the Nazi concentration camp system on which they will take notes during my presentation on this topic. I will
also direct students in their examinations of maps showing the locations of the Nazi camps and monitor students during two
short media presentations on Dachau and Auschwitz. After the lesson is over, my students will be able to distinguish
between a concentration camp and a death camp and know two reasons as to why their geographic locations differed.
Students will also know that around 11 million people perished in the camps. Students will turn in their completed handout
for this lesson, which I will evaluate and return to them before the unit assessment.
Unit Topic
The Axis Wars
Standards And Key Concepts
Standards
PA- Pennsylvania Academic Standards
Subject: Civics and Government (outdated)
Area 5.2: Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship
Grade/Course 5.2.12: Grade 12
Standard A.:
Evaluate an individual’s civic rights, responsibilities and duties in systems of government.
Subject: Geography (outdated)
Area 7.1: Basic Geographic Literacy
Grade/Course 7.1.12: Grade 12
Standard B.:
Analyze the location of places and regions.
•Changing regional characteristics (e. g., short- and long- term climate shifts; population growth or decline; political instability)
•Criteria to define a region (e. g., the reshaping of south Florida resulting from changing migration patterns; the US- Mexico border changes as
a function of NAFTA; metropolitan growth in the Philadelphia region)
•Cultural change (e. g., influences people’s perceptions of places and regions)
Subject: History (out dated)
Area 8.4.: World History
Grade/Course 8.4.12: GRADE 12
Standard B.:
Evaluate historical documents, material artifacts and historic sites important to world history since 1450.
Key Content: Artifacts, Architecture and Historic Places
USA- National History Standards (US and World)
Standard Area: World History Standards for Grades 5-12
Topic/Era Era 8: A Half-Century of Crisis and Achievement, 1900-1945
Standard STANDARD 4: The causes and global consequences of World War II.
Sub-Standard Standard 4B : The student understands the global scope, outcome, and human costs of the war.
Indicator 5-12:
Analyze how and why the Nazi regime perpetrated a “war against the Jews” and describe the devastation suffered by Jews and other
groups in the Nazi Holocaust. [Analyze cause-and-effect relationships]
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Enduring Understanding(s)
The National Socialists under Adolf Hitler used concentration camps to imprison "enemies of the state," meaning any
person or group able to challenge the Nazi party's and Hitler's power.
Extermination camps were located outside of the "old reich" or Germany in order to disguise their purpose and for
efficiency since most of the people, especially Jews, who were to be exterminated came from conquered territory to
the east of Germany.
Specific Learning Outcomes
Given the information in the lecture on the development of the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, students will be
able to complete the handout, answering questions on the differences between concentration and extermination camps,
when the camp system was formalized, and how many people perished in the camps.
Given the maps in the presentation on the development of the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, students will be
able to differentiate between the geographic regions in which concentration camps and extermination camps were located.
Given the information on the Dachau camp video and in the presentation, students will be able to describe how the Dachau
concentration camp served as a model for the rest of the camp system.
Essential Questions
Does the location of the extermination camps outside of Germany influence or change your beliefs about the complicity of
the German people in the Holocaust and the atrocities carried out by the National Socialists?
Does the premeditated and systematic nature of the imprisonment and annihilation of Hitler's "enemies of the state" make
the crimes more heinous?
Materials and Resources
Materials and resources:
Books for Teacher:
Mendelsohn, John, editor. The "Final Solution" in the Extermination Camps and the Aftermath. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1982.
Delin, Grant. Lebensraum: Extermination Camps of the Third Reich. London: Westzone Publishing, 2001.
Books for Students:
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Technology resources:
Firefox, IE Explorer, Netscape, Safari
The number of computers required is 1.
The classroom must have a projector with computer attachment feature.
Attachments:
1. Nazi Camp System Handout
2. Nazi Camp System Handout Answers
Links:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Recent New York Times Article on the Holocaust
UCSB Website on Nazi Concentration Camps
US Holocaust Museum Animated Maps
US Holocaust Museum Website
Activities And Procedures
Springboard
Time: 8 minutes
Introduce lesson topic and related news article
Teacher: Today our topic is the development of the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany. How many of you have
studied this part of history before? (Students: Raise hands if they have learned about this topic previously) I figured that
many of you had learned about the Holocaust and World War II in previous history classes. So, today I wanted to focus on
something that is often overlooked or confused when discussing concentration camps and the Holocaust and that is the
difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp in Nazi Germany.
But first, why is it important that we learn about this period in world history? (Students provide answers) Absolutely! We
learn about these events because they still relate to our world today. For example, I have here a New York Times article from
January 2011 in which the French railway system formally apologizes for its role in the transport of prinsoners to
concentration camps. This article is from 2011. When did World War II end? (Students: 1945) Right. So almost 70 years later,
this topic, the Nazi concentration camp system, is still making the news. Thus, this event is obviously pivotal to understanding
our world today.
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Transition
Time: 2 minutes
Teacher passes out handouts on which students will record notes during the presentation. Teacher instructs students to take
notes during the lecture.
Activity 1
Time: 7 minutes
Teacher begins to give students a chronological overview of the development of the Nazi concentration camp system as the
students take notes.
The teacher begins,
"Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison those whom they defined as political,
ideological or racial opponents of the regime. In time their extensive camp system came to include concentration camps;
labor camps; prisoner of war camps; transit camps; and extermination camps or death camps.
Question break: What is the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp? Can you give examples of
both? Do you think it is important to distinguish between the two? Why?
(Ideal Answer- The term concentration camp (Konzentrationslager) refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined,
usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a
constitutional democracy. Extermination camps (Vernichtungslager)were established killing centers for efficient mass murder.
Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as detention and labor centers, killing centers (also referred to as 'death
camps') were almost exclusively 'death factories.' In some sense, all of the concentration camps were death camps in that
thousands of inmates died of starvation, being worked to death, exposure to the elements, epidemics and disease, or simply
being executed for alleged crimes. However, the camps are classified on the basis of their primary, or intended, function.
It’s a profound misunderstanding, of course, to think that a ‘concentration camp’ and an ‘extermination camp’ were the same.
Concentration camps like Dachau were indeed established in Germany very early on during Hitler’s rule, but they were not
built to kill the Jews. Whilst some Jews were sent there, as were Gypsies and other at risk categories in the Nazi state, these
camps were primarily established to imprison the Nazis’ political opponents and the majority of inmates were released after
a stay of anything from a few months to a few years. Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling – torture and
other forms of mistreatment were commonplace – and a number of people were killed, with the SS sometimes pretending
they died whilst ‘trying to escape’ – but this was not the norm. These concentration camps were conceived not as
extermination centers but as places of oppression. As such the Nazis wanted people to know that they existed. The
concentration camp of Buchenwald, for example, was built on a hillside, directly overlooking the city of Weimar.
Extermination camps, on the other hand, only came into existence during the war and were all situated in Nazi occupied
Poland. Places like Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were in remote areas and only had one purpose – the murder of the Jews.
99% of people who arrived at these camps were dead within a few hours.
Part of the confusion about the two types of camp is caused because the biggest camp of all – Auschwitz – was both a
concentration and an extermination camp. It opened in 1940 as an even nastier version of a pre-war concentration camp
(Rudolph Hoess, the SS commandant had trained at Dachau) and then subsequently developed into a place of extermination
as well.)
Beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison so-called "enemies of the state." Most
prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies),
Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior.
The most prominent of these early concentration camps was Dachau, located northwest of Munich, which was established in
the spring of 1933 by the SS. Dachau came to serve as a model for an expanding and centralized concentration camp system
under SS management.
Activity 2
Time: 8 minutes
Teacher shows students the interactive map of Dachau to reinforce how Dachau served as a model for other camps. As the
students watch the mini-film, the teacher monitors them.
Watch interactive map of Dachau http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005214&MediaId=7825
Activity 3
Time: 15 minutes
Students return to taking notes, and the teacher continues,
"When Hitler authorized SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, to centralize the administration of the concentration camps and
formalize them into a system in July 1934, Himmler chose SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke for this task. Eicke had been
the commandant of the SS concentration camp at Dachau since June 1933.
As commandant of Dachau in 1933, Eicke developed an organization and procedures to administer and guard a
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concentration camp. The organization, structure, and practice developed at Dachau in 1933-1934 became the model for the
Nazi concentration camp system as it expanded. The daily routine at Dachau, the methods of punishment, and the duties of
the SS staff and guards became the norm, with some variation, at all German concentration camps. Among Eicke's early
trainees at Dachau was Rudolf Höss, who later commanded the Aushwitz concentration camp.
After Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Nazis arrested German and Austrian Jews and imprisoned them in
the Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, all located in Germany."
Question break: Can you locate Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen on your maps?
Students use their fingers to locate these camps on the map provided in the handout. The teacher monitors students to see if
they have correctly located the camps.
After the violent Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis conducted mass arrests of
adult male Jews and incarcerated them in the concentration camps.
The outbreak and expansion of war radically altered the makeup and composition of the concentration camp system. The
camp population expanded dramatically with the arrival of foreign forced laborers, foreign political opponents and
resistance fighters, and prisoners of war.
Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of
prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on
prisoners. Following the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis increased the number of prisoner-of-war
(POW) camps. Some new camps were built at existing concentration camp complexes (such as Auschwitz) in occupied
Poland.
To facilitate the "Final Solution" (the genocide or mass destruction of the Jews), the Nazis established extermination camps
in Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population. The extermination camps were designed for efficient mass
murder. Chelmno, the first extermination camp, opened in December 1941. Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans
there. In 1942, the Nazis opened the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka extermination camps to systematically murder the Jews
from the interior territory of occupied Poland.
Question break: Can you locate the extermination camps on your map? Why do you think these camps were located in
Poland and not in Germany?
Students use their fingers to locate these camps on the map provided in the handout. The teacher monitors students to see if
they have correctly located the camps.
(Ideal Answer: The Nazis had at least two good reasons for building the death camps outside of Germany. First, they were
easier to conceal from the German people. Given the chaotic wartime conditions in the territory surrounding the Altreich,
they were easier to conceal in general. As Richard Brietman pointed out while writing about the so-called "euthanasia"
killings:
"It was one thing ... to kill hundreds of thousands of East European Jews on site in the East -- in inaccessible places, with
police cordons preventing spectators from attending. It was quite another thing to murder Jews in Germany or Western
European countries... "
...Second, the vast majority of murdered Jews came from conquered territory to the east and south (especially in Poland) -why go to extra trouble to ship them back into Germany?)
Activity 4
Time: 8 minutes
Teacher shows students the interactive map of Aushwitz to reinforce the distinction between concentration and
extermination camps. As the students watch the mini-film, the teacher monitors them.
Watch interactive map of Auschwitz http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005189&MediaId=3371
Activity 5
Time: 7 minutes
Students return to taking notes, and the teacher continues,
"The Nazis constructed gas chambers (rooms that filled with poison gas to kill those inside) to increase killing efficiency and
to make the process more impersonal for the perpetrators. At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau extermination
camp had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.
In order to ensure an efficient flow of Jews from Nazi-occupied lands, Jews often were first deported to transit camps such
as Westerbork in the Netherlands, or Drancy in France, en route to the killing centers in occupied Poland. The transit camps
were usually the last stop before deportation to an extermination camp.
As the Third Reich began to collapse, thousands of prisoners in German-occupied territories were sent on forced marches to
the German interior in order to prevent the mass capture of prisoners by Allied forces. Surviving prisoners described these
brutal ordeals as “death marches,” due to the high mortality rate and the ruthlessness with which the SS guards shot those
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unable to keep up. Due to both the forced marches and the collapse of supply shipments to the camps during the last winter
of the war, the death count among prisoners from starvation, disease, and exposure increased dramatically. Historians
estimate that nearly half of the more than 700,000 prisoners left in the concentration camp system in January 1945 had died
by the end of May. Hundreds more died even after liberation because their bodies had sustained too much abuse to permit
survival.
Scholars have estimated that the Nazi regime incarcerated millions of people in the concentration camp system between
1933 and 1945. It is difficult to estimate the total number of deaths. However, current estimates generally state that around
11 million people died in various concentration camps, POW camps, and death camps (more than 6 million Jews died in
Holocaust)."
Activity 6
Activity 7
Activity 8
Closure
Lesson Recap
Time: 5 minutes
Teacher says, "So lets do an abridged review of what we've learned in this lesson."
1) What is the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps?
(Ideal Student Answer: The term concentration camp (Konzentrationslager) refers to a camp in which people are detained or
confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable
in a constitutional democracy. Extermination camps (Vernichtungslager)were established killing centers for efficient mass
murder. Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as detention and labor centers, killing centers (also referred to
as 'death camps') were almost exclusively 'death factories.')
2) Describe the “enemies of the state” that the Nazis placed in early concentration camps.
(Ideal Student Answer: German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses,
homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior)
3) In what year did Hitler authorize SS leader Himmler to formalize the concentration camp system?
(Ideal Student Answer: 1934)
4) Which concentration camp served as a model for the organization and procedures used throughout the concentration
camp system until the end of World War II?
(Ideal Student Answer: Dachau)
5) What is the generally accepted estimate for the number of people who perished in the concentration camp system?
(Ideal Student Answer: 11 million)
Teacher finishes with, "Excellent job today class! Please turn in your handouts from today's lesson so I can give you some
feedback on the notes you took in class."
Assessment/Evaluation
Diagnostic
Students will utilize prior knowledge of the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camp system to respond to questions
throughout the teacher's lesson on development of the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany. Thus, by observing the
students' participation, engagement, and responses to the questions in the teacher's presentation, the teacher will be able to
assess the students' prior knowledge on these topics.
Formative
Students will utilize the information conveyed in the presentation on development of the Nazi concentration camp system to
fill-in responses and notes on the provided handout. The teacher will collect the students' handouts at the end of class to
evaluate them for completion and accuracy.
Summative
By learning about the development of the Nazi concentration camp system, students will be able to accurately answer the
teacher-prompted questions at the end of the lesson. The teacher will observe students' oral responses to check for student
understanding of the lesson.
Assessment/Rubrics
Before the lesson, the teacher should go over the student participation rubric and the note-taking rubric so that students
know what is expected of them. During the lesson, the teacher will observe and evaluate student understanding through their
participation in the lesson. Upon completion of the lesson, the student handouts will be evaluated using the note-taking
rubric, as well as the answer sheet for the handout.
Attachments:
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1. Nazi Camp System Handout Answers
2. Note-taking Rubric
3. Student Participation Rubric
SPLED/Accommodations
Physical
Students' desks will be situated in a U-shape to focus their attention on the teacher's presentation and the mini-films.
Students must be able to see the teacher and film presentations from where they are sitting, and there must be enough room
around the outside of the U-shape to allow for all students to move about the classroom when necessary.
Learning Styles
The presentation will be given orally and be accompanied by a handout that outlines the presentation in order to aid both
visual and aural learners. All students will take notes during the teacher's presentation, which will especially benefit tactile
learners.
Special Needs
For visually impaired students, it is important that the teacher and students communicate in a manner that allows the
visually impaired student to understand and record his/her notes from the lesson.
For hearing impaired students, it is important that the teacher and students communicate in a manner that allows the
hearing impaired student to understand and record his/her notes from the lesson, as well as to contribute to the class
discussions.
For special education students that struggle with notetaking, the teacher should provide these students with a more
structured note framework to which they can add or the teacher should give these students assistance with notetaking.
When moving the desks into a U-shape, the teacher must be conscious of students with physical disabilities in order to
ensure that they can actively participate in the class and view the presentation given by the teacher.
Lesson Analysis and
Reflection
After giving this lesson in my social studies methods course, it was clear that the original 25 minutes was not enough to cover
all the content. Thus, I have extended the lesson time to 60 minutes in order to give this topic due diligence.
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