Even before the start of the war, the German command was tasked with preparing for the organization of camps. In these camps, it was supposed to contain prisoners of war, racially handicapped persons, unreliable elements and everyone whom the Third Reich deemed unworthy of life under the "New Order".
The names are different, the outcome is the same
It was believed that the conditions of detention in military camps are more "lenient" than in concentration camps. The difference lies in the very definition of these institutions: in a military camp, prisoners were supposed to "contain", and in a concentration camp - to "concentrate". From the standpoint of international law, a prisoner of war should have every chance to get out of captivity at the end of the war. A person who arrived at a concentration camp was initially considered inferior, for him there was only one outcome - death.
Since the Wehrmacht did not recognize any rights other than the rights of the Aryan nation, both prisoners of war and prisoners of concentration camps were kept in appalling conditions. The exceptions were the places of imprisonment of the captured allies: in front of Europe, even Nazi Germany tried to save its face. As for the Soviet prisoners of war, they died in the camps by tens and hundreds of thousands of starvation, caused by unsanitary diseases and "scientific" experiments. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, as food, prisoners of war often got only the grass growing under their feet, the sky served as a roof over their heads, and the walls were fences made of barbed wire.
Labor and death
At an early stage, even before the start of the Great Patriotic War, it was possible to leave the concentration camp. Unreliable elements who arrived at the institution served their sentences, were subjected to agitation processing, signed a document on non-disclosure of information and were released. After the appointment of Theodor Aiche as camp manager, the situation changed. Aikhe took the matter seriously: he centralized the institutions controlled by his department and drew a line between death camps and labor camps.
After the decree was issued in 1942 on the final solution of the Jewish question, the gradation of institutions became even clearer. The Jews who arrived in the camps were immediately separated from the rest of the prisoners, were not involved in production and were subject to destruction. All disabled people fell into the same category.
The Wehrmacht was more loyal to the rest of the "inferior" races (Slavs, for example), allowing them to give their labor for the good of Germany before death. In the labor camps, the death rate was also huge. The Germans involved in the production of people, albeit meagerly, were fed. Some of the prisoners in the labor camps survived to the end of the war and were freed by the onslaught of the Allies and Soviet troops.
