A concentration camp is created for the purpose of detaining political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, usually during a time of war. The term, death camp, is applied to facilities set up by Nazi Germany during World War II for the express purpose of killing the Jews of Europe, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles and many others, all of whom seldom lived more than twenty-four hours beyond arrival. .

             The Nazi regime first created concentration camps, such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen, in Germany and Austria as penal labor camps where people were sent for specific periods of time based on court sentences, however when the war began, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, prisoners of conscience, and people caught during round-ups were also sent to these camps. The people in these camps were essentially slave labor for the Third Reich in factories and armaments factories, and near the end of the war, they cleared bombed cities in Germany proper. Although not technically death camps, time spend in concentration camps generally ended in death, due to beatings, torture, liquidation of the sick by an injection of phenol into the heart, executions, diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis and dysentery, and hunger, since food rations were about 700 calories per day. .

             The regime created four camps, Chelmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, for the specific purpose of killing people who arrived there as quickly as possible. One of the main differences between concentration camps and death camps was that death camps had roughly only about 1,000 prisoners working there, who would be chosen during selections as needed to replace members of previous crews. These prisoners live in barracks, and their only jobs were to service the gas chambers and crematoria, prepare the corpses for burning by cutting off their hair and pulling out gold teeth, segregate the clothing and property of the victims, melt down the gold into bars and prepare them to be sent to the Bank of the Third Reich.