(German: Erziehungshäftlinge, EH)

Under a decree of May 1941 from Heinrich Himmler, “reeducation labor camps” were to hold workers “refusing labor or lazy individuals whose behavior is equivalent to the sabotaging of work.” In these camps, “intensive labor” would “reeducate them in the spirit of organized labor and in this way set an intimidating example as a warning to others.”

First reeducation prisoners were sent to Auschwitz I in July 1941. Instead of triangles, they had letters “E” sewed on their striped uniforms. In January 1943, a separate reeducation camp was set up for them in Monowitz. They were treated just as brutally as the other prisoners, forced to perform hard labor and fed starvation rations. As a result, about 1,400 prisoners died out of the 9,200 prisoners in this category, mostly Poles but also Russians, Ukrainians, Frenchmen and Italians. Reeducation women prisoners, in total 1,800 of them, were placed in camp BI a in Birkenau.

(Mini dictionary of terms from the history of Auschwitz)