Final answer:
Upon arrival at Nazi concentration camps, individuals were faced with two options: being sent directly to gas chambers for execution or being subjected to forced-labor camps where they were overworked to death or eventually killed if unable to work.
Step-by-step explanation:
At Nazi concentration camps, the men, along with women and children, were given two grim options upon arrival. One option was immediate death in the gas chambers, particularly at extermination camps like Treblinka, where captives from the resistance and others were sent directly for execution. The other option, often determined during a process known as 'selection', was to become a part of the forced-labor camps.
In these labor camps, located in places like Auschwitz and Majdanek, individuals were exhausted through grueling work, little nourishment, extreme conditions, and were eventually killed if deemed unfit for labor. The German SS, spearheaded by figures like Adolf Eichmann, effectively turned concentration camps into facilities for mass murder through overwork and systematic executions.
Concentration camps during the Nazi regime operated as places of terror where prisoners were dehumanized, overworked, and subject to harsh and fatal treatments. Conditions were abhorrent, marked by overcrowding, starvation, and disease. The choices prisoners faced reflect the brutal reality of the Holocaust, an event where human rights were utterly disregarded, and survival odds were dismal.