As Allied forces advanced deeper into German territory, they encountered sites of unspeakable horror and human suffering: the Nazi concentration camps. On April 29, 1945, American soldiers liberated Dachau, one of many concentration camps to be liberated by the end of the war. These camps revealed to the world the scope of Nazi horrors and gave new meaning to the war.
When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he and his Nazi Party began implementing a heavily racialized set of policies. Within this Nazi framework, the German “Aryan” was viewed as “racially superior,” and other races, including Slavic peoples, blacks, and the Roma-Sinti became “inferior.” This worldview also deemed communists, socialists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with physical and mental disabilities as “undesirable” to German society.
Most notably, Nazi racial theory conceptualized Jews as an “inferior race” that, to Nazi theorists, posed an existential threat to the survival of the German people. Once in power, the Nazis began persecuting these groups in the name of German security. In March 1933, the first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened near Munich, originally for political rivals.
Many other camps—like Buchenwald—opened in the following years, first as detention centers for those deemed enemies of the state. Soon, a series of laws, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, institutionalized legal persecution of many of these groups—most notably Jews—into Germany’s legal codes, systematically stripping their civil rights.
By 1938, Jews were routine targets of stigmatization and persecution, the worst being the vandalizing and burning of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses as part of the “Night of the Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht). In the fall of 1939, Nazi officials began to gas the mentally ill and those with disabilities, a grim warning of worse killings to come. When the German war machine began rolling swiftly across Europe, more people fell under German occupation and soon suffered similar violence. By 1941, Jews and others across Europe were forced into ghettos, as Nazis removed them from German society. That same year, Nazi officials mandated that all Jews in German-held territories wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes at all times. Nazi anti-Semitism had become law for huge portions of Europe.