First colored photos of Nazi camps give chilling insight into the dawn of the Holocaust

The Daily Mail has published chilling colour photographs to show some of the earliest victims of the Nazi's fledgling concentration camp system and the horrifying conditions they were forced to endure.

Immediately after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the Nazis began rounding up tens of thousands of 'undesirables' - communists, social democrats, union officials, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses as well as common criminals, says the British publication.

The SA, SS, the police, and local civilian authorities organised numerous detention camps to incarcerate and torture their opponents. Most of these early camps closed down just a few weeks after they were opened, but many survived. Prototypes for the terrifying system that lay ahead.
 

It is not known exactly when and where these pictures, which were posted on the Vintage Everyday website, were taken. Some, including one terrible image of prisoners loaded into a train carriage, would appear to have be taken towards the end of the war, however most are believed to date from before 1939.

The SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, Esterwegen, Dachau and a facility for women in Lichtenburg, Saxony. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo (the German secret state police) until 1936.

From the mid-1930s onwards other 'undesirables' were rounded up including homeless, beggars, prostitutes, the ‘work-shy’, gypsies and alcoholics. By this time the role of the camps was beginning to change from temporary internment to permanent exclusion from society

A system of triangle badges was used to identify the inmates; Political prisoners wore a red triangle, criminals green, homosexuals pink and Jehovah’s Witnesses purple. Jewish prisoners were forced to wear an additional yellow Star of David under their classification triangle.

In 1934 Hitler authorised SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, to formalise the administration of the concentration camps into a system.

Himmler chose SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke for this task as he had been the commandant of the SS concentration camp at Dachau since June 1933. Himmler appointed him Inspector of Concentration Camps, a new section of the SS.

The organisation, structure, and practice developed at Dachau in 1933-1934 became the model for the Nazi concentration camp system as it expanded.

Eicke issued regulations both for the duties of the guards and for treatment of the prisoners. Among his early trainees at Dachau was Rudolf Höss, who later commanded the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp.

As Nazi Germany expanded between 1938 and 1939, the numbers of those labeled as political opponents and social deviants increased, requiring the establishment of new concentration camps.

While most people associate concentration camps with the Jewish holocaust in the early years, Jews formed were a small minority of prisoners. Of course this would change and by 1938 Jewish men were being rounded up and shipped off to the camps dramatically increasing the prisoner population.

By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, unleashing World War II, there were six concentration camps in the so-called Greater German Reich: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen in Austria and Ravensbrück, the women's camp.

As the war raged the concentration camps increasingly became sites where the SS authorities could kill targeted groups of real or perceived enemies of Nazi Germany.

They also came to serve as holding centers for a growing pool of forced laborers deployed on construction projects, industrial sites, and, by 1942, in the production of armaments and weapons for the German war effort.