"The first concentration camps sprang up like mushrooms during Hitler's first year of power. By the end of 1933 there were some fifty... mainly set up by the S.A. to give its victims a good beating and then ransom them to their relatives of friends for as much as the traffic would bear. It was largely a crude form of blackmail. Sometimes, however, the prisoners were murdered, usually out of pure sadism and brutality. ...[B]efore the end mercifully came, millions of hapless persons were done to death and millions of others subjected to debasement and torture more revolting than all but a few minds could imagine. But at the beginning—in the Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany probably never numbered more than from twenty to thirty thousand at any one time, and many of the horrors later invented and perpetrated by Himmler's men were as yet unknown. The extermination camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where the inmates were used as guinea pigs for Nazi "medical research," had to wait for the war."