The German Concentration Camp as a Psychological Stress

Study of deaths by suicide of homosexual prisoners in Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp

“…Homosexual men were strongly discriminated against in Nazi Germany and imprisonment in concentration camps was one of the strongest forms of discrimination at the time, including forced labor, torture and incidences of murder. These higher rates of suicidal ideation could become consummated suicides in situations of great vital pressure, as happened with homosexuals interned in Nazi concentration camps [31, 32]. …”

Suicide in Inmates in Nazis and Soviet Concentration Camps: Historical Overview and Critique

“…There was also a pronounced irritability from a chronic lack of sleep and apathy because the prisoners were suffering from malnutrition. The third phase consists in a kind of depersonalization, regressive behavior, denial, isolation of affect, and discharge of aggression through alternative channels such as dreams ( 58 , 61 , 67 ).…”

The Politics of Isolation: Refused Relation as an Emerging Regime of Indigenous Biolegitimacy

“…He distinguished it from repression as a central “mechanism of defense” for neurotic individuals, one that does not require forgetting but rather strips an experience from its “associative connections,” and separates ideas from affects (1926: 121–24). For Freud, isolation is a potent psychic aberration because of its interference with healthy associations; a conclusion that informed a range of social projects aimed at diagnosing, punishing, restoring, and governing individual psyches, most notoriously within the asylum, prison, and concentration camp (i.e., Chodoff 1970; Eissler 1959; Grassian 1983; Niederland 1968). In sum, each of these important thinkers—Aristotle, Enlightenment moralists like Diderot, Marx, Durkheim, Arendt, and Freud—offers a strikingly consistent definition of isolation despite their divergent political projects.…”