The confusion in this case stems from the use of the term Konzentrationslager. When we generally envision Concentration Camps, we tend to think of camps like Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, i.e. camps run by the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps (IKL) resp. the Economic and Administrative Main Office of the SS (WVHA), being huge structures with SS-guards, a camp Gestapo, a Kapo System, a net of sub-camps etc. And while this is the main definition for Concentration Camps (also, in distinction to death camps) for most people and most historians, the Nazis tended to use the term more liberally.

To use an example form my close area of expertise: In the Serbian town of Šabac, the Wehrmacht ran a camp intended to hold the entire male population of the surrounding area in order to subject them to questioning who was supporting the Partisans. 25.000 people were imprisoned in this camp between September and December 1941. Throughout all its correspondence, the Wehrmacht in Serbia refers to this camp as their concentration camp. However, while living conditions in this camp were appalling and executions frequent, there was no forced labor scheme, no SS-guards (the guards came from a Police Battalion), no Kapo system etc. Basically, it does not fit our popular perception of concentration camps despite the fact that the Wehrmacht is consequently calling it that.

Because the SS had been even before the war so successful in establishing concentration camps as a uniquely National Socialist institution in the minds of the historical actors, among the Nazis the moniker concentration camp can be seen – in the word of Nikolaus Wachsmann – a "brand". And not just for the Nazis, also for their prisoners and victims, the term concentration camp came to signify a unique form of Nazi imprisonment. According to the latest research, in between 1933 and 1945 and especially during the war, the Nazis ran 42.000 camps all over Europe. Most of them were not concentration camps in the narrow definition (run by the IKL or the WVHA, forced labor, Kapo Scheme). However, for their prisoners (and some Nazis as obvious from the Wehrmacht example above), that distinction mattered little since they could not ask a guard "say, is this camp run by the WVHA?" Thus in many reports as well as official conrrespondence by the Nazis, a lot of camps are called concentration camps that were not like what we have in our heads when we hear the term.

The same holds true for the camp in question here. The camp Gliks was in is the Forced Labor camp for Jews in Baltoji Voke, which according to the official registry of Nazi camps is also referred to as Waka Biala or Belaja Vaka or Weiße Wache. While little more concrete information about the camp itself is available (all I was able to find is that this was essentially two camps, one for women, one for men and that the main forced labor scheme was to dig / cut peat and that it was dissolved in 1943), similar camps were quite common all over Eastern Europe. Run by local authorities, the Wehrmacht or the local Gestapo, the purpose of these camps was – obviously – to exploit Jewish labor before handing the people in question over to the machinery of annihilation. In Lithuania alone, over 25 such camps existed and the prisoners in these camps were by en large Jews who had somehow escaped the Einsatzgruppen shootings directly after the German invasion.

The extermination program of the Germans obviously involved a lot of logistics and its speed as well as other factors were often influenced by economic and other factors. In Lithuania after the Einsatzgruppen had carried out the initial wave of shootings in 1941 after the invasion, still Jews like Gliks, as well as German Jews deported to the Ghetto in Vilinius remained. After this initial wave of mass executions, the Einsatzgruppen moved on to the other Baltic republics, the Russian core territory and Belarus. At the same time, in early 1942 the Nazis' priority in terms of the so-called Final Solution were the Polish territories. The Aktion Reinhard Death Camps as well as the Chelmno Camp in the first months of their operation almost exclusively killed Jews from Poland not just because that was the biggest Jewish population in the Nazi occupied territories but also because the Nazis calculated that getting rid of this Jewish population had priority because it freed the most food stuff which then could be used for the German population. Thus in territories like Vilnius we have this gap in the killing where from the initial wave of Einsatzgruppen, it takes some time until the killing process picks up speed again. In the meantime, the Jews of these territories were put in camps like the above mentioned in forced labor schemes.

Only with the massive expansion in the gas chambers / crematoria in Auschwitz Birkenau in 1943 do the Nazis reach a new killing capacity and while in Vilinius in the meantime, there had been mass executions etc. it is only then that these Jews come into focus of the killing apparatus again. A similar example of such a scheme like that one in Baltoji Voke and elsewhere in Lithuania would be that of the Dienststelle Schmelt. Under the authority of the Sonderbeauftragte des Reichsführers SS für fremdvölkischen Arbeitseinsatz in Oberschlesien (Himmler's Special Envoy for Jewish Forced Labor in Upper-Silesia) Albrecht Schmelt. From 1940 Schmelt operated a huge number of camps in the Upper-Silesia area where Polish jews were used to built the autobahn between Krakow and Berlin. Schmelt employed thousands of Jews while close to them in Auschwitz hundreds of thousands were killed and while Schmelt regularly deported its Jews to Auschwitz to be killed, there were Jews who worked fro Schmelt until 1944 building the Autobahn. Now in 1944, most of the Schmelt Jews were also killed but the idea was similar: While they were available or while the killing capacities were at their limit, Jews could be used for forced labor.

So to sum up: Gliks was in camp that as a Nazi camp can be called a concentration camp but that does not exactly fit what we have in mind when we hear the term. These camps were created to exploit Jews for their labor force while the killing machinery focused on other geographical areas. In 1943 when killing capacities were expanded, these camps were dissolved and their inmates send to the Ghetto to await deportation to a death camp or being executed.

Sources:

• Nikolaus Wachsmann: KL. A History of the Concentration Camps.

• Sybille Steinbacher: „Musterstadt“ Auschwitz. Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien.

• The USHMM's Encyclopeida of Camps and Ghettos.

• Yitzhak Arad: The „Final Solution“ in Lithuania in the Light of German Documentation. In: Michael R. Marrus: The Nazi Holocaust : historical articles of the destruction of European Jews. 4. The "Final Solution" outside Germany. Vol. 2, Meckler, Westport 1989, S. 737–776.

• Wolfgang Benz, Marion Neiss (Hrsg.): Judenmord in Litauen. Studien und Dokumente. Berlin 1999.