The number of prisoners in 1933–1934 is difficult to determine; Jane Caplan estimated it at 50,000, with arrests perhaps exceeding 100,000, while Wachsmann estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 people were subjected to detention without trial in 1933. About 70 camps were established in 1933, in any convenient structure that could hold prisoners, including vacant factories, prisons, country estates, schools, workhouses, and castles. Many sites were reused as Nazi detention facilities later on. There was no national system; camps were operated by local police, SS, and SA, state interior ministries, or a combination of the above. The early camps in 1933–1934 were heterogenous and unlike those created in and after 1936, in fundamental aspects such as organization, conditions, and the groups imprisoned. Therefore, researchers have begun to call them "early camps" rather than "concentration camps". Although the camps were not sites of routine killings, their unprecedented violence marked the end of the Weimar Republic.
