Most Nazi concentration camps were located in Germany and German‑occupied Eastern Europe, especially in present‑day Poland, with additional camps across occupied territories like Austria, the Czech lands, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Baltic region. These formed a dense network of imprisonment, forced labor, and killing sites stretching from Germany eastward across the continent.

Main regions

  • Germany (within pre‑1937 borders) was the core where early camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück were established soon after 1933.
  • Occupied Poland had many of the largest and most notorious camps and killing centers, including Auschwitz‑Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek.
  • Other occupied areas such as Austria (Mauthausen), France (Natzweiler‑Struthof), the Netherlands (Vught, Westerbork), the Baltic states, and the Czech lands (Theresienstadt) also hosted numerous camps and subcamps.

Short historical context

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime created more than 40,000 camps and similar sites for imprisonment, forced labor, transit, and mass murder, concentrated mainly in Central and Eastern Europe under German control. The high density of sites in Germany and occupied Poland reflects both the regime’s power centers and its plans to exploit and destroy populations in the east.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.