How have the concentration camps described in detail by Jews in the 50s become extermination camps in the 90s?

Question

After WWII Jewish survivors of the Holocaust described in great detail the trials and tribulations of the concentration camps overseen by the German military. Today the Jews say the camps were extermination camps. Why would the survivors have lied about camp inmates providing labor for the German war effort?

Answer 1

Under what became the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, some camps that originally were "Concentration Camps" (KLs),became "extermination camps". (though that term was never officially used in Nazi bureaucracy.) Not all KL's were extermination camps: Dachau comes to mind. The most infamous of extermination camps were/are; Auschwitz/Birkenau and Bergen/Belson. The primary difference was that extermination camps were simply that: industrialized murder; Jews came right off the rail siding, and right to the showers. Some were kept to operate the camp machinery, and as slave labor around the area-but basically they existed to murder. KL's, were primarily slave labor camps. So one can reasonably assert that extermination camps were KL's, but not all KL's were explicitly extermination camps. No "lying " involved here. Finally, the German military did NOT oversee the camps, that was the Allegemeine SS; completely different, unrelated organization.

Answer 2

There is a difference. The Nazi had both extermination (Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka,Trotsj Malinetz (I'm not sure of the spelling but the camp was in Belarus and it was so 'efficiënt' that literally no inmate survived to tell the tale and thuis the camp is quite unknown) and concentration camps (Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Stutthof, Oraniënburg etc) and often, they were even part of the same complex (e..g. Auschwitz-Birkenau, which of course butchered over a million Jews, gypsies, Russian POWs etc, but also delivered slave labor to the nearby (and purpose-built) IG Farben chemical plant). Apart from those, you also had transit camps in the occupied territories (Breendonk, Westerbork etc). Generally, the extermination camps were at the fringes of the Reich (Eastern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine) whereas the concentration camps were mostly in Germany itself. Needless to say, the regime in the concentration camps very harsh too, resulting in a high fatality rate. Some 'pragmatic' Nazi's wondered whether killing off all those 'undesireables' was economically speaking good idea... To them, it was a waste of labour, infrastructure (the camps, transport) and manpower. They figured it was OK to murder them, but only after the war was won. Sigh... Sehr gründlich... Anyway, don't forget that there also were a lot of other forced labourers from all over Europe, but those weren't necessarily put into camps and sometimes even had a considerable degree of liberty. Obviously, they were not Jews.

Answer 3

confident, however the jewish have been the huge majority of them killed in concentration camps. i think of there have been hundred thousand or so gays, yet hundreds of thousands of jews killed. yet all and sundry interpreting the subject be counted could desire to understand that human beings different than for the Jewish human beings have been tortured and killed.