Concentration camps in the context of "Jewish partisans"

Play Trivia Questions online!

or

Skip to study material about Concentration camps in the context of "Jewish partisans"




⭐ Core Definition: Concentration camps

A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.

Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps (which later morphed into extermination camps), and the Soviet labour camps or gulag.

↓ Menu

👉 Concentration camps in the context of Jewish partisans

Jewish partisans were fighters in irregular military groups participating in the Jewish resistance movement against Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.

A number of Jewish partisan groups operated across Nazi-occupied Europe, some made up of a few escapees from the Jewish ghettos or concentration camps, while others, such as Bielski partisans, numbered in the hundreds and included women and children. They were most numerous in Eastern Europe, but groups also existed in occupied France and Belgium, where they worked with the local resistance. Many individual Jewish fighters took part in the other partisan movements in other occupied countries. In total, the Jewish partisans numbered between 20,000 and 30,000.

↓ Explore More Topics
In this Dossier

Concentration camps in the context of Pogrom

A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, usually applied to attacks on Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places were renamed pogroms. Nowadays the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups as well. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.

Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev pogrom (1905), and Białystok pogrom (1906). After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, several pogroms occurred amidst the power struggles in Eastern Europe, including the Lwów pogrom (1918) and Kiev pogroms (1919).The most significant pogrom which occurred in Nazi Germany was the 1938 Kristallnacht. At least 91 Jews were killed, a further thirty thousand arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps, a thousand synagogues burned, and over seven thousand Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iași pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland. Post-World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, the 1947 Aleppo pogrom, and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom.

↑ Return to Menu

Concentration camps in the context of Nazi concentration camps

Nazi concentration camps were a system of concentration camps (German: Konzentrationslager) built and operated by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. There were more than a thousand, including subcamps in Germany and German-occupied Europe.

The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Following the 1934 purge of the SA, the concentration camps were run exclusively by the SS via the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Initially, most prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany, but as time went on different groups were arrested, including "habitual criminals", "asocials", and Jews. After the beginning of World War II, people from German-occupied Europe were imprisoned in the concentration camps. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment. Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945. Following Allied military victories, the camps were gradually liberated in 1944 and 1945, although hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in death marches.

↑ Return to Menu

Concentration camps in the context of Romani Holocaust

The Romani Holocaust was the genocide of European Roma and Sinti people during World War II. Beginning in 1933, Nazi Germany systematically persecuted the European Roma, Sinti and other peoples pejoratively labeled "Gypsy" through forcible internment and compulsory sterilization. German authorities summarily and arbitrarily subjected Romani people to incarceration, forced labor, deportation and mass murder in concentration and extermination camps.

Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Romani people (or Roma) as "enemies of the race-based state", thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, the fate of the Sinti and Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Holocaust. Historians estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti were killed by Nazi Germans and their collaborators.

↑ Return to Menu

Concentration camps in the context of Commandant

Commandant (/ˌkɒmənˈdɑːnt/ or /ˌkɒmənˈdænt/; French: [kɔmɑ̃dɑ̃]) is a title often given to the officer in charge of a military (or other uniformed service) training establishment or academy. This usage is common in English-speaking nations. In some countries it may be a military or police rank. It is also often used to refer to the commander of a military prison or prison camp (including concentration camps and prisoner of war camps).

↑ Return to Menu