When we talk about the Holocaust, the imagery is usually the same. Barbed wire. Striped pajamas. The heavy, iron gates of Auschwitz. But if you really dig into the historical record—the actual blueprints and the testimonies of people like Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel—you start to realize that "what was in the concentration camps" wasn't just one thing. It was a massive, evolving machine of theft and industrial-scale cruelty. It’s heavy stuff. Honestly, it's hard to wrap your head around how organized it all was.
The camps weren't just prisons. They were basically a weird, horrific hybrid of a slave labor quarry, a high-tech (for the time) chemical factory, and a massive warehouse for stolen goods. Everything had a purpose. Nothing was wasted. That’s the part that really gets to you when you look at the archives at Yad Vashem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The Nazis were obsessed with "utilization."
The Physical Layout of the Lager
You’ve probably seen the photos of the barracks. They call them Blocks. Most of these were originally designed as horse stables. Imagine a wooden hut meant for 52 horses, but the SS would cram 400, 700, sometimes 1,000 people inside. It was tight. There were three-tiered wooden bunks where people slept five or six to a "shelf." No mattresses. Just straw that eventually turned into a breeding ground for lice and typhus.
But there was more than just barracks. Every camp had an Appellplatz. This was the roll-call square. People stood there for hours. If someone was missing, everyone stayed. Rain, snow, it didn't matter. Then you had the Lagertor, the gatehouse. Many of these, like the one at Buchenwald, had slogans like Jedem das Seine (To each his own) or the more famous Arbeit Macht Frei at Auschwitz I.
The Industry of Death
What was in the concentration camps often depended on which "type" of camp you were looking at. The Nazi system had a hierarchy.
- Labor camps (Arbeitslager) like Mauthausen, where people worked in stone quarries until they literally dropped dead.
- Transit camps like Westerbork in the Netherlands.
- Extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) like Bełżec or Sobibór, which were basically just "factories" for murder with very little housing because people weren't meant to stay alive for more than a few hours.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was a mix of everything, there were massive industrial complexes. I.G. Farben, the giant chemical conglomerate, actually built a massive synthetic rubber factory called Monowitz (Auschwitz III). They used the prisoners as a disposable workforce. It's a dark part of corporate history that still gets talked about in ethics classes today.
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The "Canada" Warehouses and the Logic of Theft
This is a detail that sounds strange at first. In Auschwitz, there was a section the prisoners called "Canada." Why? Because to the starving people in the camp, Canada represented a land of plenty.
These warehouses were filled with everything the Nazis stole from people the moment they stepped off the trains. We aren't just talking about suitcases. We’re talking about:
- Mountains of shoes.
- Thousands of pairs of glasses.
- Human hair (which was actually baled and sold to German textile companies to make felt and thread).
- Gold teeth pried from mouths.
- Prosthetic limbs and crutches.
- Children's toys and baby clothes.
It’s the sheer scale of the mundane items that hits hardest. Seeing a pile of 40,000 pairs of shoes makes the "what was in the concentration camps" question feel way more personal. It’s not a statistic anymore; it’s a person’s morning routine, their walk to work, their favorite pair of boots.
The Role of the Kapos and the Internal Hierarchy
The SS didn't run the camps alone. They couldn't. They didn't have the manpower. So, they created a brutal internal hierarchy.
The Kapos were prisoners—often common criminals brought in from German prisons—who were put in charge of work gangs. They got better food and better clothes. In exchange, they had to be more brutal than the SS to keep their positions. It was a psychological trick. The Nazis wanted to turn the victims against each other. It made the camp a "gray zone," a term coined by Primo Levi. He explained that in the camps, the line between "good" and "evil" got really blurry because people were forced into impossible choices just to survive another twenty-four hours.
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There were also Sonderkommandos. These were prisoners, mostly Jewish, who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. They didn't have a choice. If they refused, they were killed instantly. Their job was the most traumatic thing you can imagine—handling the bodies of their own people. Most were eventually killed by the SS to keep the secrets of the "Final Solution" from getting out.
Nutrition and the "Muselmann"
What was in the "kitchens" was barely food. We're talking about a diet designed to kill you slowly.
Morning was usually a "coffee" substitute made of roasted grain or acorns. Lunch was a thin soup made from rotten vegetables or turnip peels. If you were lucky, you got a piece of sawdust-heavy bread for dinner. This lack of nutrition led to a specific state of being called a Muselmann. This was a camp slang term for someone who had completely given up. They were basically walking skeletons, totally unresponsive to the world around them. Once someone became a Muselmann, everyone knew they didn't have long left.
Medical Experiments: The Darkest Rooms
In some camps, like Dachau or Auschwitz, there were specific blocks dedicated to "medical research." This wasn't science. It was torture.
Dr. Josef Mengele is the name everyone knows, but there were dozens of others. They did high-altitude tests to see how long pilots could survive without oxygen. They froze people in vats of ice water to study hypothermia. They performed horrific surgeries without anesthesia. At Ravensbrück, a camp specifically for women, doctors purposely infected prisoners' legs with bacteria and wood shavings to test the effectiveness of sulfa drugs. These women were known as the "Rabbits" because they were used as laboratory animals.
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The Infrastructure of Secrecy
The Nazis were actually pretty worried about the world finding out what was in the concentration camps. As the Red Army started closing in from the East in 1944 and 1945, the SS started "Aktion 1005." This was a massive operation to dig up mass graves and burn the bodies to hide the evidence. They blew up the gas chambers at Birkenau. They burned the paper records.
But they couldn't hide everything. The piles of ash were too big. The smell of the crematoria carried for miles. Even today, the soil around camps like Treblinka or Sobibór is still mixed with bone fragments. It’s a literal part of the landscape.
Why This History Stays Relevant
The camp system wasn't just a glitch in history. It was a deliberate, legal, and bureaucratic project. It involved architects who designed the ovens, chemists who refined the Zyklon B gas, and railway clerks who scheduled the trains.
Understanding what was in the concentration camps helps us see how easily a "civilized" society can slide into total depravity when it starts dehumanizing people. It’s about more than just the past. It’s a warning.
Actionable Ways to Engage with This History
If you want to move beyond just reading and actually contribute to the preservation of this history, here is how you can do it:
- Support Archival Digitization: Organizations like the Arolsen Archives are currently digitizing millions of documents from the camps. You can actually volunteer online to help index names and help families find out what happened to their relatives.
- Visit a Memorial Site: If you can, go to a site like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, or Auschwitz. Seeing the physical space changes your perspective in a way a book can't.
- Combat Denialism with Primary Sources: When you see misinformation online, don't just argue. Link to primary sources. The USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia is the gold standard for verified, peer-reviewed facts.
- Record Oral Histories: If you have family members who lived through this era (even as witnesses or liberators), record their stories now. The generation of survivors is almost gone.
The reality of the camps is a lot to take in. It’s messy, it’s horrific, and it’s complicated. But looking at the details—the shoes, the blueprints, the bread rations—is the only way to make sure we actually remember it the right way.