Nazi concentration camps played a central part in repression, terror and mass murder in the Third Reich. But after the end of the Second World War, historians were initially slow to explore the history of these SS camps. Only in the 1980s did sustained and systematic research get underway. Since then, the scholarly literature has grown at a great pace. This article surveys the historical literature on the camps, focusing on key themes which have emerged from studies published over the last few years: the early camps, the SS perpetrators, gender, memory, and the relationship between economics and extermination. The article critically examines recent studies on these themes and highlights important areas for future research.
This is the first account of the prison in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), set in the context of the evolution of German social policy. In the early years, the Weimar prison was characterized by hunger, overcrowding, and conflict. At this time, leading officials agreed on a new approach to imprisonment, influenced by the demand for the ‘incapacitation of incorrigibles, reformation of reformables’. This principle was championed by the modern school of criminal law, designed to replace traditional policy based on deterrence and uniform retribution. The policy of reform and repression shaped the Weimar prison. Most prison officials supported the indefinite confinement of ‘incorrigibles’. While this did not become law, many prisoners classified as ‘incorrigible’ (increasingly after ‘objective’ examinations) received worse treatment than others, both in prison and after their release. Regarding the ‘reformables’, some institutions introduced measures aimed at prisoner rehabilitation. But such policies were not fully implemented in other prisons, not least because of resistance by local prison officials. During the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, measures aimed at rehabilitation, only just introduced, were cut back again. By contrast, the repression of ‘incorrigibles’ was pursued with even more vigour than before, an important legacy for Nazi penal policy.
Is there any more potent a symbol for the destructive power of modern state terror than the nazi concentration camp? In the concentration camps, the nazis pioneered new methods of mass detention, abuse and extermination, driven by a lethal mix of extreme nationalism, bio-politics and racial antisemitism. During the short lifespan of the Third Reich -little more than 12 yearsmillions of prisoners were taken to concentration camps run by the SS, and subjected to humiliation and degradation, dirt and disease, fear and hunger, ruthless discipline and random violence, forced labour and mass murder. In all, some two million prisoners lost their lives, including around one million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, in Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest of all the concentration camps. 1 Long before the regime's final collapse in May 1945, the concentration camp came to be known as the most notorious invention of the Third Reich. To be sure, many details of the inner life of the camps remained hidden while they still existed. But it was already clear that the camps were places of brutal discipline and death. Outside Germany, reports about the camps had appeared since the nazi takeover of power. Among the earliest accounts was that of Gerhart Seger, a former Social Democratic Reichstag deputy, who had managed to escape from the Oranienburg camp outside Berlin in late 1933. Seger's memoirs described in graphic detail the brutality of the camp authorities as well as the arbitrary nature of nazi terror. With a foreword by Heinrich Mann, one of Germany's leading anti-nazi writers in exile, Seger's book was soon translated into French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch. 2 His account was just one of
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