1933 – Nazi Germany opens its first concentration camp, Dachau. Nazi Germany built and operated a system of concentration camps 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. Initially, conditions were harsh but rarely deadly, but the availability of food and shelter declined after the start of the war. Although forced labor was a ubiquitous feature of the camps, and prisoner labor was increasingly used for war production, it was only a marginal feature of overall wartime production. 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. The camps often met with approval from Germans while they were in operation, due in part to Nazi propaganda depicting the prisoners as dangerous criminals. Museums commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime have been established at many of the former camps, and the Nazi concentration camp system is universally known for violence, terror, and mass murder.
