Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: How many Nazi concentration camps were there in Poland?
German-occupied Poland contained 457 camp complexes. Some of the major concentration and forced labour camps consisted of dozens of subsidiary camps scattered over a broad area. At the Gross-Rosen concentration camp (to which Polish nationals were expelled from the annexed part of Poland) the number of subcamps was 97.[2] Under Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Auschwitz III (Monowitz) with thousands of prisoners each, the number of satellite camps was 48; their detailed descriptions are provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.[3][4] Stutthof concentration camp had 40 subcamps officially and as many as 105 subcamps in operation,[5] some as far as Elbląg, Bydgoszcz and Toruń, at a distance of 200 kilometres (120mi) from the main camp.[6][7]
After September 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, concentration camps became places where millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the war effort, often starved, tortured and killed. During the war, new Nazi concentration camps for "undesirables" spread throughout the continent. According to statistics by the German Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and subcamps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all of occupied Europe and that many of these camps were run for a limited amount of time before they were closed. Camps were being created near the centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Romani. Since millions of Jews lived in pre-war Poland, most camps were located in the area of the General Government in occupied Poland, for logistical reasons. The location also allowed the Nazis to quickly remove the German Jews from within Germany proper.
Bobrek was a subcamp of Monowitz concentration camp located in or near Bobrek, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland, and was part of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. It was built by Siemens-Schuckert and held approximately 250-300 prisoners including 50 women who were used as slave labor to produce electrical parts for aircraft and U-boat submarines. The commandant of the camp was "SS-Scharführer" Hermann Buch.
Bobrek subcamp was evacuated along with the other camps in the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945. The prisoners were sent on a death march to a concentration camp in Gleiwitz, Poland. Many were then transported by rail to Buchenwald concentration camp. While in Buchenwald, the former Bobrek workers were sought out by Siemens-Schuckert executives, who had them transported to the Siemens-Schuckert factory in Siemensstadt, a suburb of Berlin.
There is a popular misconception among the general public that most Jews went to their deaths passively. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jewish resistance to the Nazis comprised not only their armed struggle but also spiritual and cultural opposition which gave the Jews dignity despite the inhumane conditions of life in the ghettos. Many forms of resistance were present, even though the elders were terrified by the prospect of mass retaliation against the women and children in the case of anti-Nazi revolt. As the German authorities undertook to liquidate the ghettos, armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of Polish-Soviet border of 1939, overwhelmingly in eastern Poland. The uprisings erupted in 5 major cities, 45 provincial towns, 5 major concentration and extermination camps, as well as in at least 18 forced labor camps. Notably, the only rebellions in Nazi camps were Jewish.
With the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of World War II, the Nazis began the final solution of the Jews in Europe. The Jews were concentrated in ghettos and later sent to concentration and death camps where they were murdered. In the occupied territories of the USSR, Jews were murdered in mass numbers by death squads with the help of local population. This practice was later replaced by gassing the Jews in the death camps; the largest of them was Auschwitz.
Aside from being sent to Nazi concentration camps, most ethnic Poles died through shelling and bombing campaigns, mass executions, forced starvation, revenge murder, ill health, and slave labour. Along with Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the main six extermination camps in occupied Poland were used predominantly to exterminate Jews. Stutthof concentration camp was used for mass extermination of Poles. A number of civilian labour camps (Gemeinschaftslager) for Poles (Polenlager) were established inside Polish territory. Many Poles died in German camps. The first non-German prisoners at Auschwitz were Poles who were the majority of inmates there until 1942 when the systematic killing of the Jews began. The first killing by poison gas at Auschwitz involved 300 Poles and 700 Soviet prisoners of war. Many Poles and other Central and Eastern Europeans were also sent to concentration camps in Germany: over 35,000 to Dachau, 33,000 to the camp for women at Ravensbrück, 30,000 to Mauthausen and 20,000 to Sachsenhausen.[96]
The Soldau concentration camp established by Nazi Germany during World War II was a concentration camp for Polish and Jewish prisoners. It was located in Działdowo (), a town in north-eastern Poland, which after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 was annexed into the Province of East Prussia.
This section, written by Gitel Poznanski, describes the three ways that the Nazis weakened the Jewish population before putting them into death camps. The first was expulsion - forcing the Jews out of Nazi-occupied land and into Poland or the USSR. This made them easier targets for slave labor later and severed any connections they may have made at home. The first arrests of Jews were for their "protection", which quickly turned into the first detention camps in 1933. Using these camps as a threat, the Nazis forced Jews to emigrate very quickly, which often lead to illegal immigration. 
In Austria this process was much worse. In Germany the process of expulsion took place over about five years, but after the Anschluss the process was carried out in only a few months. Because of this there were over 3,500 deaths by suicide in the first year of the occupation, and the number of Jews in Austria shrunk from 180,000 to 55,000. 
Poznanski goes on to describe similar practices in many other Nazi-occupied countries: Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Denmark, Hungary, Greece, and Yugoslavia. 
The next process was the institution of slave labor. 165,000,000 Europeans were forced to work under threat of being sent to concentration camps. The Nazi strategy was not to treat them like valuable resources to be kept alive; instead they were "worked to the point of debilitation" and "kept on the edge of starvation". This practice was carried out in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, France, and Poland. 
The last process was starvation. The book provides many graphs and figures of how much food was rationed to people in each occupied country. Germany always got the most food, and any food to be found in another country was pillaged so that "Germany ate while her subjects starved".
The Catholic Church in Poland was brutally suppressed by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Poland (1939-1945). Repression of the Church was at its most severe in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, where churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported. From across Poland, thousands of priests died in prisons and concentration camps; thousands of churches and monasteries were confiscated, closed or destroyed; and priceless works of religious art and sacred objects were lost forever. Church leaders were targeted as part of an overall effort to destroy Polish culture. At least 1811 Polish clergy died in Nazi concentration camps. An estimated 3000 clergy were killed in all. Hitler's plans for the Germanization of the East saw no place for the Christian Churches.
Poland was divided into two parts by the Nazis: the Reich directly annexed Polish territories along Germany's eastern border, while and second part came under the administration of the so-called "Generalgouvernement" (General Government)—a "police run mini-state" under SS control and the rule of Nazi lawyer Hans Frank, which, wrote Davies, "became the lawless laboratory of Nazi racial ideology" and in due course the base for the main Nazi concentration camps. Yet here, Nazi policy toward the Church was less severe than in the annexed regions. The annexed areas were all to be "Germanized", and the Polish Church within them was to be thoroughly eradicated—though German Catholics could remain or settle there. In the annexed regions, the Nazis set about systematically dismantling the Church—arresting its leaders, exiling its clergymen, closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Many clergymen were murdered. Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. In a report to Pius XII regarding the dire situation, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond wrote that "Hitlerism aims at the systematic and total destruction of the Catholic Church in the ... territories of Poland which have been incorporated into the Reich ...":
Monowitz concentration camp (also known as Monowitz-Buna, Buna and Auschwitz III) was a concentration and labor camp ("Arbeitslager") run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1942–1945, during World War II and the Holocaust. For most of its existence, Monowitz was a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp; from November 1943 it and other Nazi subcamps in the area were jointly known as "Auschwitz III-subcamps" ("KL Auschwitz III-Aussenlager"). In November 1944 the Germans renamed it Monowitz concentration camp, after the village of Monowice (German: Monowitz) where it was built, in the annexed portion of Poland. SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinrich Schwarz was commandant from November 1943 to January 1945.
When the Soviet army began its advance through Nazi-occupied Estonia in September 1944, the SS started to evacuate the camp. Many prisoners were sent west by sea to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig and to Freiburg in Schlesien, present day Świebodzice, then in Germany, now Poland. 
The forced labor camp on the outskirts of Mielec, Poland was established by the Nazi occupation authorities in 1941 at the site of the former Polish airplane factory known as the "Mielec" "Heinkel Flugzeugwerke" built in anticipation of World War II. This was a forced labor camp for Polish Jews during the war which eventually turned into an SS Concentration Camp until it was liquidated in 1944. There is no Nazi documentation that says the exact number of prisoners that were at the camp throughout the war or when it switched from a labor camp to a concentration camp, and testimonies of Jews in the camps are conflicting.
In 1939 the Nazis initiated the annihilation process of the Jewish population. The most notable persons of the community, about 6,000, were sent to the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The main concentration camp in Austria was the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, which was located next to the city Linz. Many other Jews were sent to the concentration camps in Theresienstadt and Łódź and from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the summer of 1939 hundreds of factories and Jewish stores were shut down by the government. In October 1941 Jews were forbidden to exit the boundaries of Austria. The total number of Jews who managed to exit Austria is about 28,000. Part of the Vienna Jews was sent to the transit camp Nisko in Nazi occupied Poland. In the end of the winter of 1941, an additional 4,500 Jews were sent from Vienna to different concentration and extermination camps on the territories of Nazi occupied Poland (mainly to Izbica Kujawska and to other ghettos in the Lublin area). In June 1942, a direct delivery exited the city to the Sobibor extermination camp, which had around one thousand Jews. In the fall of 1942, the Nazis sent more Jews to the ghettos to the towns of the cities they occupied in the Soviet Union: Riga, Kaunas, Vilnius and Minsk. Those Jews were murdered by Nazi soldiers mainly by gunshots.
From 1934 to 1939 the government of Poland established a camp for the internment of political opponents, Ukrainian nationalists and Communists in Bereza Kartuzka (now in Belarus).During World War II, Nazi Germany established many of its concentration camps in Poland. After World War 2, the Soviet Army and the Communist government of Poland used some of the former German concentration camps as POW camps and they were later used as internment camps where Polish opponents of the Communists and the Soviets, as well as Ukrainians and ethnic Germans or their sympathizers, were imprisoned.
The first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were established in 1933 as soon as the National Socialist regime developed. They were used for coercion, forced labour, and imprisonment, not for mass murder. The camp system expanded dramatically with the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II in September 1939. The new network of Nazi concentration camps built by SS in Germany (including Austria), Poland, and elsewhere in Europe began exploiting foreign captives in the war industry. The prisoners locked into forced labour began dying by the tens of thousands from starvation and untreated disease, or summary executions meant to inflict terror. The Soldau concentration camp opened in September 1939. Also in September, the Stutthof concentration camp was built, with 40 sub-camps set up contingently for maximum profit. Some of the most notorious slave labour camps included Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen (with 100 subcamps), Ravensbrück (70 subcamps), and Auschwitz (with 44 subcamps eventually), among other places.
Maria (Marianna) Trzcińska (died 22 December 2011 in Warsaw) was a Polish judge employed for over 30 years in the People's Republic of Poland at the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland ("Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce") with the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). She investigated and researched the Nazi German World War II crimes in Poland. Trzcińska was the author of an historical monograph about the Warsaw concentration camp ("KL Warschau") set up by the "SS" in occupied Poland, the only Nazi concentration camp ever built in a European capital.
The history of Jews in Bydgoszcz ended with the catastrophe of World War II – the German invasion of Poland and the Holocaust. The city's Jewish citizens, many ethnically German, were sent to Nazi death camps or murdered in the town itself. Bromberg was the site of Bromberg-Ost, a women's subcamp of Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (Gdańsk). A deportation camp was situated in Smukała village, now part of Bydgoszcz. An estimated 3,700 citizens of Bydgoszcz – Jews and non-Jews – died during the Nazi occupation.
Homosexuals were considered to be the lowest of the low in the concentration camp hierarchy. Estimates vary widely as to the number of gay men imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust, ranging from 5,000 to 15,000, many of whom died. In addition, records as to the specific reasons for internment are non-existent in many areas, making it hard to put an exact number on exactly how many gay men perished in death camps. Homosexuals were often classified as "asocials" when sent to the concentration camps, which makes estimating the number of homosexuals in the concentration camps difficult. "Asocials" were a very broad legal category in Nazi Germany consisting of people who were "work shy" (i.e lazy), drug addicts, homeless people, alcoholics, petty criminals, and people who were merely eccentric or non-conformist, and the authorities often classified homosexuals as "asocials" as a way of showing the "deviant" nature of "asocials" in general. 
In 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard, the systematic deportation of Jews to extermination camps. Nazi authorities throughout Europe deported Jews to ghettos in Eastern Europe or most often directly to extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. Almost 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka over the course of 52 days. In some ghettos, local resistance organizations staged ghetto uprisings. None were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed. On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to liquidate all ghettos and transfer remaining Jewish inhabitants to concentration camps. A few ghettos were re-designated as concentration camps and existed until 1944.
A network of Nazi concentration camps were established on German-controlled territories, many of them in occupied Poland, including one of the largest and most infamous, Auschwitz (Oświęcim).[54] Those camps were officially designed as labor camps, and many displayed the motto Arbeit macht frei ("Work brings freedom").[49][54] Only high-ranking officials knew that one of the purposes of some of the camps, known as extermination camps (or death camps), was mass murder of the undesirable minorities;[54][55][56] officially the prisoners were used in enterprises such as production of synthetic rubber, as was the case of a plant owned by IG Farben, whose laborers came from Auschwitz III camp, or Monowitz.[48] Laborers from concentration camps were literally worked to death. in what was known as extermination through labor.[48][57]
Following the occupation of Hungary in 1944, the new extremist pro-nazi regime established a 'transit/labour camp' in a quarry in Fertőrákos, to which Hungarian Jewish and political prisoners were sent, and many thousands died here, with others transported onward to Nazi concentration camps in German occupied Poland and Germany. The site of the transit camp can be visited, and has a memorial plaque.
Before the September 1939 Nazi German–Soviet Invasion of Poland, the concentration camps built in the Third Reich held mainly German Jews and political enemies of the Nazi regime.[4] Everything changed dramatically with the onset of World War II. The Nazi concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, KL or KZ) set up across the entire German-occupied Europe were redesigned to exploit the labor of foreign captives and prisoners of war at high mortality rate for maximum profit. Millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the German war effort. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of camps reached 15,000 eventually, using civilians arrested and ambushed at random in occupied countries.[8] According to research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum conducted more recently,[9] Nazi Germany created some 42,500 camps and ghettos in which an estimated 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned and often pressed into slavery. All types of confinement were used as source of labour supply.[9]
The Catholic Church was particularly suppressed in Poland: between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. In the annexed territory of "Reichsgau Wartheland" it was even more harsh: churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Religious persecution was not confined to Poland: in Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were killed.
A controversy began when a misspoken word in Barack Obama's Presidential Medal of Freedom speech came to be known as "Gafa Obamy" or Obama's gaffe, when the President referred to "a Polish death camp" (instead of "death camp in Poland") when talking of the Nazi German transit death camp that Karski had visited. "Polish death camps" is a term often used to refer to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, as opposed to (as may be implied) Polish concentration camps. The terms "Polish death camp" or "Polish concentration camp" were reportedly promulgated by ex-Nazis working for the West German secret services. Historian Leszek Pietrzak explains the propaganda strategies from the 1950s. President Obama later characterized his term as a mis-statement and it was accepted by Polish President Bronisław Komorowski.