KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (193 page)

Dachau mug shot of the petty criminal Josef Kolacek, one of almost ten thousand “asocial” men rounded up across the Third Reich in June 1938
(International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen)

In this staged SS photograph, female camp inmates—small in numbers until the later war years—make straw shoes in Ravensbrück, 1941.
(Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück/Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten)

Roll call in Buchenwald, November 1938, with some of the 26,000 Jewish men forced into concentration camps after the Kristallnacht pogrom
(USHMM/American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, courtesy of Robert A. Schmuhl)

Polish prisoners outside a tent of the Buchenwald special camp in autumn 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War; within a few months, most inmates in the camp were dead.
(USHMM/American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, courtesy of Robert A. Schmuhl)

Czech prisoners use basic tools to break up the concrete foundations of the failed SS brickworks near Sachsenhausen, 1940.
(Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen, Mediathek)

Dachau SS men gather near the body of Abraham Borenstein, one of the Jewish prisoners “shot trying to escape” on the camp’s plantation in May 1941.
(Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen, Mediathek)

Slave labor in the SS quarry at Flossenbürg, circa 1942
(Beeldbank WO2—NIOD)

Heinrich Himmler (second from right in the group of uniformed Nazi dignitaries) in Mauthausen in 1941, passing a prisoner carrying a rock from the quarry
(Museu d’Història de Catalunya/Fons Amical de Mauthausen)

Dachau mug shot of the Austrian Jew Eduard Radinger, who was murdered in 1942 during the “euthanasia” program. On the reverse, one of the doctors responsible, Friedrich Mennecke, recorded the prisoner’s alleged crimes (e.g., “theft”) and misconduct in the camp (e.g., “laziness”).
(Staatsarchiv Nuremberg, ND: NO-3060)

Taking a break from their murderous task: Dr. Mennecke (third from right) and other “euthanasia” physicians unwind at Lake Starnberg on September 3, 1941, upon their return from Dachau.
(Bundesarchiv, B 162 picture-00680)

As epidemics such as typhus spread through the camps, naked prisoners wait in the Mauthausen courtyard during a mass disinfection in June 1941.
(BMI/Fotoarchiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen)