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As early as 1933, the victims of National Socialist persecution were rounded up and transported to concentration camps. Dachau was the first of these camps to be erected; located on the outskirts of Munich, it became the model on which all other concentration camps were based. As time went on, more and more camps were built, mostly by the prisoners themselves. Men and women were separated and children and the elderly were often killed straight away. The selection process was simple: you were either “capable of work” or “incapable of work”. Subjected to the most difficult conditions, the prisoners’ forced labour proved to be particularly profitable for German industry. There were different types of camps: some of them were labour camps, some were extermination camps and some were both. One principle behind extermination camps was “extermination through labour”. The most infamous of the extermination camps remains Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Every main camp was surrounded by satellite camps, which were smaller and often located near factory buildings, so camps were to be found in many places. Prisoners often worked in the factories outside the camps and cleared the rubble after bomb strikes. The march to work took the forced labourers through the streets of German towns. At first, relatively few prisoners were incarcerated but the longer the Second World War went on, the more overcrowded the camps became. Shortly before the liberation many prisoners were forced to march away from camps near the advancing war front. These “death marches” often lasted for weeks on end with starvation and exhaustion claiming the lives of many.