What were the majority of the concentration camps used for?

Answer 1

The concentration camps were used by the Nazis to round up and segregate Jews, who were forcibly captured and then shipped to these camps to be killed. The Nazis had developed efficient but brutal methods for murdering large numbers of people, and then awaiting the next group to be brought in. The concentration camps were the final stop for millions of Jews who formerly lived in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and several other countries; the camps were also the final stop for several other groups the Nazis deemed unworthy of being alive (such as political dissenters, people with "defects" such as blindness or mental retardation, Jehovah's Witnesses and members of other religious groups who refused to participate in the war).

The prisoners, which even included Jewish infants and toddlers, were often tortured, usually starved, forced to endure extremes of heat and cold without adequate clothing or shelter, and in for the vast majority, once they were rounded up, the Nazis sent them to their deaths in gas chambers or crematoria. In some of the camps, prisoners were expected to perform various kinds of manual labor, often under increasingly harsh conditions, and many were also subjected to intrusive and painful medical "experiments." More than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and the vast majority died in the various concentration camps that Hitler had set up especially for the purpose of carrying out his "Final Solution."