Read complete books and articles on: Concentration Camps

Concentration Camp - a detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians. The term was first used to describe prison camps used by the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection (1868–78), those created by America in the Philippines (1898–1901), and, most widely, to refer to British camps built during the South African War (Boer War) to confine Afrikaners in the Transvaal and Cape Colony (1899—1902). The term soon took on much darker meanings. In the USSR, the Gulag elaborated on the concept beginning as early as 1920. After 1928, millions of opponents of Soviet collectivization as well as common criminals were imprisoned under extremely harsh conditions and many died.

During World War II concentration camps were established throughout Europe by the Nazis, and throughout Indochina and Manchuria by the Japanese. Of the millions of people of many nationalities detained in them, a large proportion died of mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease. In both Nazi and Japanese camps inmates were exploited for slave labor and medical experimentation, but the Nazis also established extermination camps. In the best known of these—Majdanek, Treblinka, and Oświęcim (Auschwitz), in Poland—more than six million mainly Jewish men, women, and children were killed in gas chambers. Among the most notorious Nazi camps liberated by U.S. and British troops in 1945 were Buchenwald, Dachau, and Belsen.

The term has also been applied to the U.S. relocation centers for American citizens of Japanese origin and others interned in the W United States during World War II. In China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–69) millions were sent to euphemistically named "reeducation" camps, and in Cambodia after Pol Pot came to power (1976) an estimated one million civilians died in "reeducation" camps. North Korea maintains a system of political and criminal prison camps in which inmates are sentenced to harsh physical labor and are underfed and mistreated. In 1992, reports of malnutrition and killings in concentration camps for Muslim, Croat, and Serb male civilians in Bosnia led to attempts by international organizations to identify the location of the camps and inspect them.

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Concentration Camps

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp » Read Now
by Wolfgang Sofsky, William Templer. 343 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

A book that will fundamentally enrich our knowledge of human nature, the organization of power, and the execution of terror.--Der Spiegel During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist...
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A book that will fundamentally enrich our knowledge of human nature, the organization of power, and the execution of terror.--Der Spiegel During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, terror labor, and the business- like extermination of human beings. Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down. Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space, perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable atrocities. As a result, daily life was reduced to a permanent struggle for survival, even as the meaning of self-preservation was extinguished. Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the walking dead--to chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and torture. The society of the camp was dominated by the S.S. and a system of graduated and forced collaboration which turned selected victims into accomplices of terror. Sofsky shows that the S.S. was not a rigid bureaucracy, but a system with ample room for autonomy. The S.S. demanded individual initiative of its members. Consequently, although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners, officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in passing or on a whim, with cause, or without. The order of terror described by Sofsky culminates in the organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty has now become possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.
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2.

Inside the Concentration Camps: Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler's Death Camps » Read Now
by Eugene Aroneanu, Thomas Whissen. 176 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

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. Their vivid, firsthand accounts heighten the reality of this experience in ways no third-person narrative can...
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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. Their vivid, firsthand accounts heighten the reality of this experience in ways no third-person narrative can capture. Even when they are at a loss for words, their struggle to find language to express the unspeakable is, in itself, mute testimony to the ordeal etched forever on their memories. The testimonies are arranged to reflect the chronology of camp experience (from deportation to liberation), the living conditions of camp life (from malnutrition to forced labor), and the various methods of abuse and extermination (from castration to gassing and cremation). The chronology gives the accounts a narrative flow and even creates a certain suspense, especially as liberation nears and hopes rise.
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3.

Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land » Read Now
by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Eli Pfefferkorn, David H. Hirsch, Roslyn Hirsch. 185 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...she had been in concentration camps. Now, in Auschwitz...been in prisons and concentration camps since 1933. As soon...of her life in a concentration camp. Having...
4.

Birkenau: The Camp of Death » Read Now
by Marco Nahon, Jacqueline Havaux Bowers, Steven Bowman. 158 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...enlarged photographs of concentration camps on display in the big window...Konzentration Lager concentration camps ." But whats a concentration...decorations extends even...
5.

The Buchenwald Report » Read Now
by David A. Hackett. 397 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...II The SS and Concentration Camps 27 III Numbers and Types of Concentration Camps in Germany 28...classic book on the Nazi concentration camps, The Theory and Practice...
6.

Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube » Read Now
by David Wingeate Pike. 447 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

This important work focuses on the experience of the large Spanish contingent within the Mauthausen concentration camp, one of the least known but most terrible camps in Nazi Germany. Refugees from the repercussions of the Civil War, 7,000 Spanish Republicans were arrested in France by the invading...
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This important work focuses on the experience of the large Spanish contingent within the Mauthausen concentration camp, one of the least known but most terrible camps in Nazi Germany. Refugees from the repercussions of the Civil War, 7,000 Spanish Republicans were arrested in France by the invading Nazis in the collapse of 1940. A microcosm of the experience of national prisoner communities, their story possesses a unique historical value. No other national group succeeded in placing its members in all the key clerical positions in the SS administration, and no other group managed to hide and save all its basic records.Vilified by Franco and condemned by Hitler, their story makes an outstanding contribution to the literature of the holocaust.
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7.

Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness » Read Now
by Konnilyn G. Feig. 547 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library
8.

Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1938-1945 » Read Now
by Hermann Langbein, Harry Zohn. 502 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In this major and comprehensive work, hailed by Le Monde as a "monumental study", Hermann Langbein shatters the myth that all prisoners of concentration camps during World War II passively let themselves be slaughtered. A prisoner himself and one of the leaders of resistance at Auschwitz, Langbein...
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In this major and comprehensive work, hailed by Le Monde as a "monumental study", Hermann Langbein shatters the myth that all prisoners of concentration camps during World War II passively let themselves be slaughtered. A prisoner himself and one of the leaders of resistance at Auschwitz, Langbein painstakingly documents the detailed account of the history of the camps and the story of resistance. Spanning the initial years to the chaotic weeks before liberation, Against All Hope is the first systematic presentation of organized resistance. Deeply moving, it is an unforgettable testament to the resilience and determination of the human spirit. As the camps were being established, Langbein examines the composition of the initial prisoners; a mixture of political prisoners (Reds), convicted criminals (Greens), Jews, and "anti-socials" and reveals the brutal struggle for camp domination between the Reds and Greens. With analytic detail, he presents the history and nature of the individual camps and the inmate self-government. In "The Actors", Langbein recognizes for the first time the various inmate groups, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Russians, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies and Jews, and how they related to resistance. Langbein portrays the incredible impossibility of resistance against the all-powerful total domination of the Nazi camp administration. The prisoners were to be morally broken, psychically disabled, and even physically destroyed. To resist against this systematic demoralization, its isolation from the rest of the world, and its intention to exterminate, was inconceivable. Through chronic malnutrition, beatings, torture, and the permanent terrorism ofthe SS, the prisoners were led to believe "there is only one way out of here: through the chimney". And yet, resistance, individual initiatives and organized action, to aid fellow inmates, to escape, to revolt, to thwart manag
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9.

The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps » Read Now
by Terrence Des Pres. 218 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library
10.

Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz » Read Now
by Rudolph Hoss. 323 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

By his own admission, SS Kommandant Rudolf Hoss was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is the first complete translation of Hoss's memoirs into English. The...
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By his own admission, SS Kommandant Rudolf Hoss was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is the first complete translation of Hoss's memoirs into English. The Memoirs of Kommandant Rudolf Hoss were written between October 1946 and April 1947. At the suggestion of psychologist Professor Stanislaw Batawia and Professor Jan Sehn, the prosecuting attorney for the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, Hoss wrote explanations of how the camp developed, his impressions of the various personalities with whom he dealt, and even about the destruction of the millions in the gas chambers. This written testimony is perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because it is the only candid, detailed, and (for the most part) honest description of the Final Solution from a high-ranking SS officer intimately involved in carrying out the plans of Hitler and Himmler.,With the cold objectivity of a common hit-man, Kommandant Hoss bloodlessly chronicles the discovery of the most effective poison gas and the technical obstacles that often thwarted his aim to kill as efficiently as possible. Staring at the horror without reacting, Hoss allows conditions in his camp to reduce human beings to walking skeletons, then he labels them as subhumans fit only to die. Readers will witness Hoss's shallow rationalizations as he tries to balance his deeds with his increasingly disturbed, yet always ineffectual, conscience. Published here for the first time are several photographs, including those of Hoss, the Nazi occupation of Poland, and of the camp itself; original diagrams of the camps; the original minutes of the Wannsee conference; and Hoss's final letters.
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11.

National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria (Includes discussion of concentration camps in multiple chapters) » Read Now
by Erika Thurner, Gilya Gerda Schmidt. 268 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Originally published in German, Erika Thurner's NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND GYPSIES IN AUSTRIA is the ground-breaking study of Nazi policy toward Gypsies during the Third Reich. The recent upsurge of anti-Gypsy violence in Austria illustrates both the horror of the treatment of Gypsy tribes and the timeliness of this volume. Illustrated.
12.

The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life- and Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps » Read Now
by Heinz Heger. 120 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
13.

Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity » Read Now
by Primo Levi, Stuart Woolf. 160 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
14.

Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps » Read Now
by Robert H. Abzug. 192 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the...
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Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored.
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15.

Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II » Read Now
by Joan Myers, Gary Y. Okihiro. 252 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
16.

The Managed Casualty: The Japanese-American Family in World War II » Read Now
by Leonard Broom, John I. Kitsuse. 228 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...were removed to internment camps at the very outbreak of the...urbanization and progressive concentration in the Los Angeles area...center or to the remaining camps at...