Concentration Camps-
- The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933.
- German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives.
- As Nazi Germany expanded by bloodless conquest between 1938 and 1939, the numbers of those labeled as political opponents and social deviants increased, requiring the establishment of new concentration camps.
- From as early as early as 1934, concentration camp commandants deployed prisoners as forced laborers for the benefit of SS construction projects, including the construction or expansion of the camps themselves.
- After Nazi Germany unleashed World War II in September 1939, vast new territorial conquests and larger groups of potential prisoners inspired the rapid expansion of the concentration camp system to the east.
- Concentration camp authorities increasingly diverted prisoners from meaningless, backbreaking labor to more goal-oriented if still backbreaking and dangerous labor in extractive industries, such as stone quarries and coal mines, and construction labor.
- 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.
- The organization, structure, and practice developed at Dachau in 1933-1934 became the model for the Nazi concentration camp system as it expanded.
- In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo (the German secret state police) until 1936.