the two worst camps. In its two years of existence, over 870,000 people were annihilated inside Treblinka's hidden compound. In the 58 months that Auschwitz was functioning, almost 2.5 million people were murdered there. All death numbers have to be estimated from the camps because there are no certain records of how many people were killed by the Germans.
             The concentration camps w ere bad enough for the prisoners inside, but at least they had more chance of living than those at an extermination camp. The prisoners who would soon live inside built the concentration camp at Buchenwald. "During the entire summer of 1937, the SS forced the prisoners to use their 'free time' to carry huge stones from the quarry to the camp" (Chatel 2). Any prisoner who carried a rock that was too small for the guard's liking was shot dead (2). "The official goal of Buchenwald was the destruction of the prisoners by work" (3). They planned to work the poor, emaciated creatures until their bodies could no longer take the strain. Many prisoners died from exposure to the climate, horrible sanitary conditions and repeated beatings. Medical experiments also took the lives of some prisoners inside Buchenwald, but mostly the prisoners were worked to their death (3). The camp was started with only 300 working prisoners in 1937, but it soon became massively overcrowded, with a total population of 80,436 prisoners by 1945. Life inside the camp was terrible, but the prisoners were not sentenced to immediate death as inside the extermination camps. However in its eight years of existence, there were between 50,000 and 60,000 people killed inside Buchenwald's gates (Chatel and Ferree 2). A testimony by a survivor of Buchenwald, Ludwig Scheinbrunn, claims that "As of September 21, 1939, I was obliged to carry corpses in Buchenwald. I did that for two and a half years. During the winter of 1939, they erected a tent camp near the actual crematorium, where...