Are there any historical occurrences of revolts by the prisoners within the European concentration camps during WWII?

In short, yes.

First of all, there were the revolts in the Operation Reinhard Camps Treblinka and Sobibor in the summer of 1943. The second one being the most famous. In both cases, the few Jewish prisoners left alive to perform economic services for the SS conspired to attempt revolt and break-out and it both cases, the revolts pretty much ended the operation of the camps effectively. We know more about the Sobibor one due to the fact that it was the more successful. In essence, it worked like this:

The prisoners having made themselves makeshift weapons killed the German officer in charge that day while he was getting his hair cut. It started too early unfortunately because one of the guards discovered armed prisoners and so all that was left for them was to charge the fence the straight-on. Of the 600 involved prisoners, about 300 managed to escape. Most of them however, were found again by the search squads and murdered. 58 are known to have survived to the end of the war, most of them fighting with local Soviet and Polish partisan groups.

In Treblinka similar events occurred with the most striking being that most of the organizers of the revolts had formerly been in the Red Army, thus having at least some experience or expertise in such an undertaking.

Similarly, in Mauthausen in 1944, a group of Soviet Pows, all officers, also organized an uprising and outbreak. Sent there to be killed because most of them had already escaped other camps before, the Mauthause group organized a revolt while inside a special prison compound within the Mauthausen CC. Killing their kapos and immediate guards, the also charged the wall and managed to short out the electric fence with wet blankets. Of the 500 inmates, 419 managed to escape the camp, many of the starved inmates breaking down immediately however. Of those that escape, 11 are known to have survived the war until the end, some of them hiding out in a makeshift shelter in the woods for the better part of the 1944/45 winter while others were hidden by local farmers.

There was also a revolt by the Sonderkommando (the Jewish prisoners tasked with disposing the corpses of gassed Jews) in Auschwitz towards the end o 1944. Learning that they were to be killed, the Sonderkommando managed to kill several guards and blow up one of the crematoria they were assigned to, however all of them were killed during the uprising. Their story is known due to the documents they themselves buried in the Auschwitz complex.

Other revolts are known to have taken place in the camps of Kruszyna (1942), Minsk-Mazowiecki (1943), and Janowska (1943). These however are little known and little researched because there were no known survivors after the war to tell their stories.

Also, there were forms of lower scale resistance in pretty much every camp. Hermann Langbein, himself a survivor of Dachau and Auschwitz wrote extensively about the organized resistance in the camps mostly form the communist perspective during which for example cruel Kapos were killed or in Buchenwald where once the main body of SS guards left because the Americans were hours away, the prisoners basically liberated themselves.

There were also revolts in several ghettos, the most famous being the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, you can read about in my previous post on Jewish resistance.

As for more on the Sobibor uprising, also check out the Claude Lanzmann documentary featuring the last known survivors of the uprising describing their experience as well as the made for tv movie with Rutger Hauer, Escape from Sobibor.

For the others see:

  • Yitzhak Arad (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press.

  • Ainsztein, Reuben. Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe: With a Historial Survey of the Jew as Fighter and Soldier in the Diaspora. New York, 1974.

  • Ginsberg, Benjamin (2013). How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

  • Rees, Laurence (2012). Auschwitz: The Nazis and the "Final Solution".

  • Matthias Kaltenbrunner: Flucht aus dem Todesblock. Der Massenausbruch sowjetischer Offiziere aus dem Block 20 des KZ Mauthausen und die "Mühlviertler Hasenjagd". Hintergründe, Folgen, Aufarbeitung. Innsbruck [u.a.] 2012 (If you read German, please read this one. It's by a friend of mine and he has done excellent excelltn work that went far above and beyond what was required for his dissertation here)

  • Hermann Langbein: „Nicht wie die Schafe zur Schlachtbank!“ Widerstand in NS-Konzentrationslagern. Fischer TB, 1980.

/r/AskHistorians Thread