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Notes -
The distinction is there were various kind of camps:
Arbeitslager (work camps), which were slave labour camps. Inmates were treated very poorly, but there was an active effort to keep them alive because they provided either useful manual labour or some element of skilled labour.
Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), where the inmates were more or less expected to work at menial tasks until they died.
Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) where almost all individuals were murdered immediately, usually within an hour or two of arrival. Only the strongest individuals would be selected as sonderkommandos, and these groups would be liquidated from time-to-time. If you had made it to November 1943 (the end of Operation Reinhard), the only extermination camp operational past that point was at Auschwitz (with the exception of a brief resumption of gassing operations at Chelmno in June 1944). The others were all farther east and by mid-1943 the Nazis realized they were at risk from a sudden Soviet advance.
The two main reasons why Auschwitz gets so much attention in memoirs/popular histories is that Auschwitz had a work camp, a concentration camp, and an extermination camp; so while more people were murdered there than anywhere else, there were also tens of thousands of survivors. Additionally, it was the principle destination for the western (and Hungarian) Jews who were the last to be targeted, so they were both those who entered the concentration and labour camp systems last (making them most likely to survive), and those able to freely write about their experiences post-war.
This, incidentally, reminds me of one of the logic problems of the "resettlement" thesis.
Let's consider Soviets. When Operation Barbarossa commenced, the Soviets did, indeed, brutally resettle/kill various ethnic populations considered unreliable, like Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Volga Germans, in operations that could well be considered genocidal. The logic was that if areas with such unreliable populations would fall to Germans, they might work or fight for them.
However... this resettlement happened eastwards, to Central Asia and Siberia, not westwards. If some Soviet official had suggested resettling them westwards, they would have probably been considered crazy, or a traitor. After all, the idea was not giving Hitler more workers faster!
Yet, the resettlement thesis seems to suggest the Germans were intent on moving a lot of Jews eastward, towards the Soviets, and continue this movement even after the tide turned and the Soviets started approaching Germany. If so, this would have meant that a population that the Nazi ideology said was particularly predisposed to Communism and supporting the Soviets - the Jews - would have been reached by the frontline more easily, making them potential and willing Soviet workers and soldiers.
Why would they do this? The idea that the Nazis just killed them solves that problem, at least.
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From the very beginning of the opening of the camps on the Bug (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) reports poured out, mostly through the Polish Underground, so much that the Polish Government in Exile published this white paper in the winter of 1942 while the killing was still at its height.
A number of Jews from the early transports to Treblinka escaped and returned to Warsaw and spoke about what they had seen. The testimonies of many of these witness were recorded and preserved in the Ringelblum Archive which was meant to be a record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was buried in early 1943 and was not recovered until a few years after the war. It can be read here. At least one of these escapees gave a direct description of the gas chambers.
In April of 1942 the Polish Underground published a report on Belzec, which said that large trainloads of Jews arrived daily, and none ever emerged, though the people in the nearby towns did not know how the killing was done. It can be read on page 350 of Yitzhak Arad's book.
In 1943 a Slovakian Jew who had been deported to Sobibor, but then detailed to work on nearby labor projects rather than killed, escaped and gave a report. The labor site was near enough to Sobibor that he could smell the burning flesh from the ongoing cremations. Can be read on page 211 of Jules Schelvis' book on Sobibor.
Kurt Gerstein witnessed gassings at Belzec in 1942, and attempted to get the news out of occupied Europe through several channels (including Sweden and the Vatican). Gerstein's report contains a lot of huge exaggerations and is a favorite punching bag for revisionists, but the report was confirmed in its essentials by Wilhelm Pfannenstiel (who had been with Gerstein at Belzec) in a conversation with, of all people, French Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier in the 60s.
There is more but the above is from strictly 1942 to 43. There also survived a number of documents demonstrating the mass transports of Jews to these camps, but none concerning their transfers out.
If you count the shootings in the USSR as 'systematic killing' that is also pretty clear. The reports of these massacres survive. There are also plenty of pictures.
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