Would concentration camps grow or shrink in a Nazi victory?

Would concentration camps grow or shrink in a Nazi victory?

  • Grow

    Votes: 37 77.1%
  • Shrink

    Votes: 7 14.6%
  • Stay the same size as OTL

    Votes: 4 8.3%

  • Total voters
    48
If the Nazis won the war and conquered the USSR up to the Urals, would the concentration camp system grow or shrink after the war?

IOTL the Third Reich built 27 main camps and over 1,100 satellite camps throughout its existence. At its peak there were 715,000 inmates in January 1945.

In a victory scenario would the system have the same functions as IOTL?

Once the Jews and Roma are exterminated what groups would be the largest source of prisoners?
 
Grow at first because of Generalplan Ost, then shrink after its completion. After Generalplan Ost's completion, the camps will pretty much only be needed to imprison dissidents.
 
Once the Jews and Roma are exterminated what groups would be the largest source of prisoners?
Probably a mixture of Slavs, dissidents, and if some nutjob like Himmler takes power "insufficiently Aryan" Germans (read: those who refuse to adopt Himmler's crazed neo-Pagan fantasies).
 
Probably a mixture of Slavs, dissidents, and if some nutjob like Himmler takes power "insufficiently Aryan" Germans (read: those who refuse to adopt Himmler's crazed neo-Pagan fantasies).
Himmler is often called crazy but besides his infatuation with paganism was there anything about his beliefs that set him significantly apart from other Nazi fanatics in the Third Reich like Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann etc?
 
If you haven't read about Generalplan Ost you should. It called for killing more than a hundred million people. They specifed what percentage of each ethnic group they wanted eliminated. It was going to be brutal.

Yeah, the concentration camps would have been doing a roaring trade.
 
It's strange how for a long time Generalplan Ost was rarely mentioned on this forum but now it seems everyone knows about it (could this be mainly because of CalBear's TL)?

It depends on how you define "now" and "long time." Calbear's TL began eight years ago.
 
they'll invent new groups to persecute or broaden the definitions of old ones. they'd need some kind of scapegoat to justify their totalitarian regime.

They'd need more than that. They'd need ethnic groups from whom to plunder their wealth in order to buy their wholly unsustainable economic model a few more years at a time.
 
The smell of ash and burnt flesh would fill the skies of Europe for decades, at least, if not far longer so long as they were allowed to carry on in their atrocities. Regimes such as that repugnant ideology have a constant need for enemies in the shadows of society, infiltrators and more and more "sub-humans". No one, not even the so called 'Aryans' would be safe from themselves. All the Jews, Roma and Slavs are dead? Time for the Frenchmen to line up, then so on and so forth, unending. Literally.
 
I initially thought this was in relation to if the existence of concentration camps would grow or shrink the Nazi chance of victory. Which lead me to this idea. The Nazis were very good at shooting themselves in the foot in terms of victory, because a vanilla fascist Germany would have had a much better chance of success than Nazi Germany. Jews and other groups targeted for persecution and extermination would have remained in Germany, contributed to the war effort, science and the economy, and many would have joined a fascist movement. An example of this is Mussolini's Italy, where there were many prominent Italian fascists who were Jewish. Despite this, Mussolini turned them over to the Nazis when Italy became a satellite of Germany rather than an independent ally. In the areas of Eastern Europe that the Nazis "liberated" from the Soviet Union, initially many people were on board with the Germans because they removed the Communists, and capitalism, free enterprise and local economies began to thrive. This was clamped down on because the Nazis hated the people who lived there and targeted them for oppression and extermination. However, a vanilla fascist Germany could have gained the support of the populations formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, and forged an alliance against Communist Russia. Nazi racial policy did not allow for this. Long story short, fascism is evil. However, the Nazis killed or sought to kill massive populations of people that would have or could have joined Germany in it's goals of expansion and anti-Communism.
 
I'm not sure they would grow - and don't forget there were two types of camps. One for prisoners who would be in bad condition but not specifically exterminated, more like a GULAG system where they would be worked hard, the other extermination camps or camps where part was for extermination and part for slave labor. In a victory where Generalplan Ost is being made to happen, you would not bother to ship Slavs from conquered Russia back to Auschwitz etc especially since you'll be busy rebuilding the rail system and moving supplies east and raw materials west. The strong and healthy will be put to labor and worked to death, the rest allowed to starve. You only actually need to kill a relatively small number - a couple of camps for party members, intellectuals, troublemakers you want to get rid of quickly. Those destined for survival and slavery can be segregated easily, and any children who will become "naturalized" Aryans taken away - probably those under 6 only who will forget the past.

The Jews had to be brought together from lots of locations, and killing them openly (at least in Western Europe) without the fiction of deportation would have been too obvious and perhaps not accepted by the population unlike "just" deportation. In the east, particularly in what was Russia the local population is the one being exterminated so it is not going to be a question of being subtel, just as efficient as possible.

I expect some of the populations selected for death who are relatively close to established camps will be funneled through them, and some local populations likewise in the east for any camps established for the persons who need to be dealt with quickly. If nothing else the Germans were big on efficiency. why waste time and effort transporting tens of millions when working them to death or letting them starve where they are is much cheaper and will get the job done nearly as quickly. After all, look at Stalin - millions starved to death in the Holodomor in a 1-2 years no camps needed.
 
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