Westerbork--- Westerbork was the main transit camp used by the Germans during their occupation of Holland to send Jews to the death camps in Poland. Between July 1942, and September 1943, approximately 110,00 Jewish people passed through the two camps. Westerbork was located near Assen, in northeastern Holland. It was actually set up by the Dutch government before the Nazi invasion, as a refugee camp for Jews fleeing persecution in Germany. After the Nazi takeover, the Germans employed …showed first 75 words of 456 total…

…showed last 75 words of 456 total…from labor camps. By 1945 thousands of prisoners who had become too weak to work were shipped there, to die off slowly by starvation and typhoid. In the one-month of March, more than 18,000 died. The first commandant in Bergen-Belsen was SS-Hauptsturmführer Adolf Haas. His previous assignment had been the concentration camp known as Niederhagen/Wewelsburg near Paderborn. In early 1944, Haas was replaced by SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, who had been working in concentration camps since 1934.