Before the Holocaust: Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, 1933–9, Birkbeck College (review)

Is there anything new to be said about Nazi concentration camps, one of the most heavily researched topics in recent historiography? Recent work has overwhelmingly focused on the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War when inmate numbers rose dramatically and the camps became sites of genocide during the Holocaust. But what about the early years of Nazi rule when camp inmates were counted in thousands and not in millions? In July 2008, an international conference, organized by Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann, scrutinized the history of the concentration camps in pre-war Nazi Germany. It was part of a major research project on the Nazi concentration camp system between 1933 and 1939, directed by Nikolaus Wachsmann and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

In the keynote speech Richard J. Evans (Cambridge) located the concentration camps in a wider network of Nazi repression and control. Evans critiqued the recent literature that stresses ordinary Germans’ consent with the Nazi regime and downplays the Nazi regime’s coercion of ordinary people. Not social outsiders, but representatives of the German working class – especially Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists – formed the overwhelming majority of the 100,000 or more people held in the makeshift camps of 1933 and 1934. The camp population decreased after the Nazi regime’s consolidation in the summer of 1934. Political repression was increasingly transferred from the concentration camps to the state penal system. From the mid 1930s the camps’ main purpose gradually shifted from political repression to the persecution of social outsiders, such as criminals and so-called asocials. New purpose-built camps were opened and inmate numbers shot up, especially after raids against so-called asocials in 1937–8 and Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht in November 1938. The SS camps had become an extrajudicial instrument of preventive policing. By the time war broke out in September 1939, the camps held more than 20,000 men and women who fell short of Nazi expectations for full members of the racial community.

The first panel examined the regime’s changing attitudes towards the concentration camps as the Third Reich evolved between 1933 and 1939. Christian Goeschel (Birkbeck) investigated suicides in the pre-war concentration camps to shed light on the changing relationship between the legal system and the SS concentration camps. Traditional interpretations of this relationship take up a simplified notion of Ernst Fraenkel’s classic 1941 interpretation of the Third Reich as a ‘dual state’, characterized by a conflict between the legal system (the normative state) and the SS/police apparatus (the prerogative state). Goeschel revealed that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between good and evil. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration-camp authorities passed off the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. Goeschel also looked at actual suicides in the pre-war camps to highlight the reactions of individual inmates to life within the camps. Joseph Robert White (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) discussed the detention of Prominente (prominent prisoners) in the concentration camps during the Nazi capture of power, 1933–4. Camp officials abused these prisoners, who were often leading Weimar Social Democrats and Communists, beating them up, assigning them to very hard and dirty work details and in some cases killing them. Exile and foreign newspapers, such as the Manchester Guardian, reported the fate of prominent prisoners, including the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, the lawyer Hans Litten and the Social Democrat Gerhart Seger (whose wife and daughter had been arrested after Seger’s escape from the Oranienburg camp in late 1933). The regime was concerned about the impact of these reports on public opinion, abroad and in Germany, and dismissed them as atrocity propaganda. White concluded that the harsh treatment of Prominente foreshadowed the brutal persecutions of the final solution. Stefan Hördler (Humboldt Universität Berlin) presented his research on the Lichtenburg concentration camp, a men’s...