Inside Concentration Camps

This book is a translation of an oral history of the concentration camp experience recorded immediately after World War II as told by men and women who endured it and lived to tell about it. The testimonies reflect upon deportation, life in the camp, forced labor and variou methods of abuse and extermination.

The first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone." In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century.

Terror was central to the Nazi regime, and the Nazi concentration camps were places of horror where prisoners were dehumanized and robbed of their dignity and where millions were murdered. How did prisoners cope with the brutal and degrading conditions of life within the camps? In this highly original book Maja Suderland takes the reader inside the concentration camps and examines the everyday social life of prisoners - their daily activities and routines, the social relationships and networks they created and the strategies they developed to cope with the harsh conditions and the brutality of the guards. Without overlooking the violence of the camps, the contradictions of camp life or the elusive complexity of the multicultural prisoner society, Suderland explores the hidden social practices that enabled prisoners to preserve their human dignity and create a sense of individuality and community despite the appalling circumstances. This remarkable account of social life in extreme conditions will be of great interest to students and scholars in history, sociology and the social sciences generally, as well as to a wider readership interested in the Holocaust and the concentration camps.

"Masterly" -- The New Yorker A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century.

It remained for Nazi Germany to design the most satanic psychological experi ment of all time, the independent variables consisting of brutality, bestiality, physical and mental torture on an unprecedented scale. What were the effects of this massive assault on the human spirit, on man's ability to assimilate such experiences, if he survived physically? While the terror of the Nazi concentration camps has been indelibly engraved in the history of Western civilization as its most shameful chapter, little systematic study has been addressed to the subsequent lives of that minority of inmates who were fortunate enough to escape physical annihilation and lived to tell about their nightmare. Dr. PAUL MATUSSEK, a respected German psychiatrist, aided by a small group of collaborators, performed the task of identifying a group of victims (mostly Jews but also political prisoners), who, following their liberation, had settled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. By careful interviews, questionnaires, and psychological tests he brought to bear the methods of sensitive clinical inquiry on the experiences of those who dared to reminisce and who were sufficiently trusting to share their feelings and memories with clinical investigators. It is a telling commentary that many people, even after the passage of years, refused to respond.

On 18 July 1943, one-hundred and twenty Jews were transported from the concentration camp at Drancy to the Lvitan furniture store building in the middle of Paris. These were the first detainees of three satellite camps (Lvitan, Austerlitz, Bassano) in Paris. Between July 1943 and August 1944, nearly eight hundred prisoners spent a few weeks to a year in one of these buildings, previously been used to store furniture, and were subjected to forced labor. Although the history of the persecution and deportation of France's Jews is well known, the three Parisian satellite camps have been subjected to the silence of both memory and history. This lack of attention by the most authoritative voices on the subject can perhaps be explained by the absence of a collective memory or by the marginal status of the Parisian detainees - the spouses of Aryans, wives of prisoners of war, half-Jews. Still, the Parisian camps did, and continue to this day, lack simple and straightforward descriptions. This book is a much needed study of these camps and is witness to how, sixty years after the events, expressing this memory remains a complex, sometimes painful process, and speaking about it a struggle.

Offers an overview of the scholarship that has changed the way the concentration camp system is studied over the years.