Horrifying Images of Nazi Death Camps

A German gravedigger burying victims from Wobbelin concentration camp near Ludwigslust, Germany, after the camp’s liberation in early May 1945.

Female prisoners at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in Poland in 1944.

A sign outside Auschwitz reading “Halt!” in German and Polish, warning people to stay away from the camp.

The perimeter fence of Auschwitz.

The Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in summer 1943, where at least 167,000 people were killed between April 1942 and mid-October 1943.

A group of children who survived the camp are photographed upon its liberation by the Red Army in 1945.

A group of prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp, in about 1943.

Beds at Auschwitz. Sometimes four or five inmates were forced to sleep on a single bunk.

A former Auschwitz prisoner shows the serial number tattooed on his arm.

Personal belongings of Auschwitz prisoners are strewn along the train tracks in the snow outside the camp entrance.

Deportees with yellow stars sewn to their coats – a sign that they’re Jewish – arrive at Auschwitz.

Members of one of the SS Totenkopfverbände, or Death’s Head Units, at Bełżec extermination camp in 1942.

Found near Kolo, near the Chełmno extermination camp in Poland, this is the type of van converted by the Nazis into a mobile gas chamber, with exhaust fumes diverted into a sealed rear compartment filled with prisoners.

A reconnaissance photograph of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, taken on June 24, 1944.

A view of smoke rising from the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

Human remains, including those of an anti-Nazi German woman, found in the crematorium at Buchenwald when it was liberated in April 1945.

SS troopers load the corpses of inmates of the Belsen concentration camp onto a truck for burial in a common grave.

A stack of box-paper urns containing the ash remains of victims killed at the Theresienstadt Ghetto and extermination camp established by the Nazis near the fortress town of Terezín in Czechoslovakia.

The first crematorium built at Auschwitz, photographed after the war in 1955.

An aerial view of the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, established by the Nazis as a stop on the way to extermination camps for some prisoners and as the site of the “final solution” for others.

The front gate at the Bełżec extermination camp in Poland.

The railroad tracks leading to Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, where Jews, Poles, Roma, and Soviet POWs were killed.

The deportation of children from Łódź Ghetto in Poland to the Chełmno extermination camp in Poland, September 1942.

Barbed wire fences enclosing a portion of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

Prisoners assembled for roll call at Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where prisoners from more than 15 countries, about 30% of them Jews, were held.

Children liberated at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945.

Prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany mix concrete at a nearby quarry during forced labor.

Jewish musicians at the Janowska concentration camp, forced to form an orchestra for the amusement of the Nazis.

Prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp in forced labor building a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) track between Weimar-Schöndorf and Buchenwald, which they completed in three months.

Female prisoners at Auschwitz II-Birkenau stand for roll call in early 1944.

The crematorium at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland after its liberation in 1944.

Jewish prisoners from Subcarpathian Rus, in what is now Ukraine, await selection – for forced labor or extermination – at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Hungarian Jews from the Tét ghetto walk towards the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944.

Prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany stand for roll call (refusal to participate was punishable by death).

Jewish women from Subcarpathian Rus in what is now Ukraine, selected for forced labor at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, march towards their barracks after disinfection and head-shaving..

Jews forced to build a as chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in the spring of 1943

A gas chamber and crematorium (where, according to calculations by German authorities, 1,440 corpses could be burned every 24 hours) at Auschwitz II-Birkenau after construction was completed in March of 1943.

Jews imprisoned at Buchenwald after Kristallnacht – the so-called “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, during which Nazis and their sympathizers all over Germany and Austria destroyed Jewish businesses and synagogues and arrested some 30,000 Jews for incarceration.

Jews from Zamość in southeastern Poland, known for its Hasidic Jewish community, being deported to Bełżec in April 1942.