Even after 1943, more Germans were held in state prisons than in concentration camps. But conditions in the latter deteriorated too. From the mid-1930s, the camps had begun to function mainly as centres of detention for ‘asocials’ and other minorities, after most of the political opponents of the regime for whom they had originally been intended had been released on good behaviour. As soon as the war began, however, the camps began to resume their earlier function as centres of detention and deterrence for the wider German civilian population, above all former Communists and Social Democrats.
