SchutzstaffelKnown most commonly as the SS, the military group Schutzstaffel, meaning Protection Squadrons, was responsible for security, ethnicity identification, settlement and population policy, the German police force, and intelligence collection and analysis. The SS was in charge of the "Jewish Problem" and had plans to restructure the entire racial composition of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. Attempting to solve the "Jewish Problem", the SS began to plan and implement the "Final Solution": the extermination of European Jews.
Headed by Heinrich Himmler, the SS acted as an independent organization from the German government. This allowed it to bypass regulation established by the government, such as the construction of concentration camps. Concentration camps are the best example of organization in the Holocaust. A centralized, systematic, camp where prisoners were held indefinitely, forced to do hard labor, and murdered en masse. Originally, they had held criminals and political prisoners, but after the "Final Solution" was conceived, new, larger camps were created to hold enemies of the state, mainly the Jews. |
Ghettos |
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The SS was also in charge of establishing Ghettos: compulsory Jewish quarters in cities where the Jewish people were forced to live.
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The construction plans for one of the building in Auschwitz, Germany's most notorious concentration camp, is pictured on the right. No concentration camp had been built before on the scale that Auschwitz was built. It was designed to hold over 200,000 people at one time. The construction of Auschwitz began in April of 1940, on an empty Polish barracks. The camp started out with 22 buildings, but became a complex of 3 main camps and 40 sub-camps.