Nazi control in Germany was supported by the forced labour camps within Germany. These had developed to provide a place to contain the enemies of the rising Nazi regime. These camps however, were not appropriate for the implementation of the Final Solution and as Gerhard Hirschfeld notes, "Concentration camps were involved in the mass extermination of the Jewish population right from the start." Even though Jews died in considerable numbers in forced labour camps, they were not dying with any sort of calculable efficiency. Concentration camps appeared as the result of the Reichstag fire in 1933 and the mass arrests that followed involving the trade unions, Social Democrats and Communists. The escalation of war brought with it the urgency to once and for all destroy the Jews. The first hurdle for Himmler was to devise an extermination camp, an unprecedented act for which their was no existing model. As Raul Hilberg asserts, "The most striking fact about the killing centre operations is that, unlike the earlier phase of the destruction
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