The Origin of the Nazi Concentration Camp System | FULL Documentary

February 27th, 1933. The Reichtag building in Berlin is engulfed in flames. By the next day, President Hindenburg signs the Reichtag fire decree, suspending civil liberties across Germany. In the hours and days that follow, arrests begin. Within weeks, thousands of Hitler's political opponents disappear into a new kind of detention facility. places that operate outside German law, beyond judicial review, under the control of state police and Nazi paramilitary forces. But here's what most people don't know. The concentration camp wasn't invented that night. The idea had been developing for months, refined in secret meetings, debated in Nazi circles, modeled on detention systems from other nations. The camps didn't emerge from chaos. They were designed, planned, engineered by specific men with specific goals. You know where it ended. Avitz, the gas chambers, the systematic murder of millions. But how did it begin? Who first proposed holding German citizens without trial in camps beyond legal oversight? Where did the Nazi leadership even get the idea? What were these facilities originally meant to accomplish? And how did that original purpose mutate into something far more sinister? Tonight, we trace the true origin of the Nazi concentration camp system. Not the propaganda version the Nazis themselves told, but the actual development, the influences, the planners, the debates, the decisions. We'll meet the architects who built this machinery of repression and follow the deliberate process by which a modern European nation constructed a parallel detention system designed to operate beyond the rule of law. This is the story of how an idea became infrastructure, how planning became policy, how a system was born. November 1918, Germany loses World War I. The Kaiser abdicates. The new VHimar Republic emerges from chaos. Weak, unstable, despised by extremists on both left and right. In the streets, communists and nationalists fight for control. The Spartacist uprising in Berlin, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, right-wing fry, paramilitary units crushing leftist movements with extreme violence.