Concentration camps are internment centers established to confine minority and national groups and political prisoners. During World War II the Nazi government of Germany administered several concentration camps and relocation facilities. The camps were of two general types:

• Death or extermination camps where virtually everyone who arrived was immediately killed.
• Camps where people who arrived were either immediately killed or assigned to labor camps.
  

Camp officials kept records of Jews who were used for slave labor. Some of the concentration camp records that survived the war were seized by British, Soviet, and U.S. military forces. In the United States these records can be found at:

United States Holocaust Research Institute
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2150

National Archives and Records Administration
Pennsylvania Avenue and 8th Street NW
Washington, DC 20408

There are a few databases on the Internet with information about people in concentration camps, and more information is being added. See the following web sites for information:

http://www.jewishgen.org/

http://www.ushmm.org/

The Family History Library has some concentration camp records. For example, death registration records from the Mauthausen, Austria, camps are available on microfilm:

Totenbuch, Konzentrationslager Mauthausen, Jan. 7, 1939–Apr. 29, 1945 (Death Register, Concentration Camp Mathausen, Jan. 7, 1939–Apr. 29, 1945). Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 19–. (FHL film 0812876–0812877.)

Records associated with concentration camps and Nazi persecution of Jews are discussed in “Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)” in this outline. An example of these, which is listed in the catalog under Concentration Camps is:

War Crimes Case Files, 1945–1959. Suitland, Maryland: National Archives and Record Administration, 1992–1994. (On 45 FHL films beginning with number 1788042.)