re: #594 Sergey Romanov

I just can’t bring myself to say that this or that camp wasn’t a “death” camp. They were. Maybe that wasn’t their primary function and the death tolls do not compare to extermination camps, but they were still enormous enough.

Sure, but the difference is big. Think about the early or so-called wild concentration camps operated by SA early under NS rule, for instance. A lot of them closed and never re-opened. There were deaths, lots of them. But IMHO not really comparable to war-time camps.

Some camps functioned mostly as transit stations to the death camps. So few people died there but their function was to kill people elsewhere. Others, like Mauthausen or Buchenwald, of course, were places of huge numbers of death.