Page "Extermination camp" Paragraph 10

The Nazis distinguished between extermination camps and concentration camps.

As early as September 1942, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, M. D., an SS physician, witnessed a gassing of prisoners, and in his diary wrote: " They don't call Auschwitz the camp of annihilation Lager der Vernichtung for nothing!

" The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials, when Dieter Wisliceny ( a deputy to Adolf Eichmann ) was asked to name the extermination camps, and he identified Auschwitz and Majdanek as such.

Then, when asked " How do you classify the camps Mauthausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald?

" he replied, " They were normal concentration camps, from the point of view of the department of Eichmann.