Verdrängter Terror: Geschichte und Wahrnehmung sowjetischer Speziallager in Deutschland (review)

Bettina Greiner’s book on the Soviet “special camps” in postwar Germany masterfully combines extensive primary research with a deep knowledge of the existing scholarship, thereby creating a lengthy monograph of great import that calls into question common assumptions about the nature of these special camps and their prisoners. The book also asks pertinent questions about their place, or lack thereof, in Germany’s contentious historiography. Bracketed by a well-conceived introduction and a short but thoughtful conclusion that strives to locate these special camps in the history of twentieth-century camp systems, the book consists of three lengthy parts. The first deals with internments and Soviet military tribunals (SMT) in the Soviet Occupational Zone. Its focus is on Soviet intent; accordingly, it is based on Soviet documents, where available, or on largely successful attempts to discern Soviet intent from the results of its policies. The second section, which relies on the prisoners’ accounts, deals with the experiences of those interned and those sentenced by SMTs. The last section considers the memories of imprisonment and their place in Germany’s many debates about history and memory, as well as German guilt and victimhood. The last section in particular is persuasive due to the author’s keen eye for detail and a finely tuned ear for discursive nuance.

Greiner is most assertive in her argument that internments, trials, and eventual imprisonments in the Soviet Occupation Zone had nothing to do with de-Nazification. Internments and imprisonments after trials were not two separate issues, as many scholars commonly assume, but two separate expressions of the same basic issue: Soviet security concerns. The Soviets prioritized the security of their occupational regime above all other considerations, an approach that included prophylactic security measures and that was driven by short-term political needs and “Chekist logic.” Greiner argues that there was no particular interest in finding and punishing NS perpetrators, even though Nazis were, of course, among the camp inmates.

The age structure of those who were interned and those who were sentenced by SMTs is illuminating in this context. The former, who were also released earlier, tended to be older and were thus more likely to have had an official function in Nazi Germany. Men and women tried and sentenced by the SMTs tended to be younger, and while most of them had been organized in the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls (BDM), very few—if any—had held any positions of responsibility. The Soviet occupational forces nevertheless saw in those youngsters a security threat to the occupation regime. De-Nazification was clearly not the primary purpose of the system. Indeed, the Soviets’ interest in the prisoners ended with their imprisonment. There was also no official interest in putting the prisoners to work or adequately provisioning them, although it should be noted that food was scarce everywhere at this time. It is indeed a cruel joke that life in the camps improved after they came under the jurisdiction of the Gulag in the summer of 1948.

Greiner’s attempt to provide a dense description of camp experiences is laudable, but the accounts she uses seem curiously uniform and strangely anecdotal. Yet the uniformity of the accounts, which Greiner relates to the former prisoners’ attempts to find a place to express their experiences and memories, is the focus of the book’s thought-provoking third section. It is a study of ambivalence and of the inability of most of the former prisoners and their putative audiences to negotiate the ambivalent meanings of these crimes, camps, and victims in a meaningful form.