Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann
Research Grant
The concentration camp was one of the defining creations of the 20th century, a space where forced labour, torture and murder were brought into the modern state and among the different types of camps the Nazi concentration camp takes a central place.
Much has been written about the Nazi camps during the Second World War, when prisoner numbers grew dramatically and the camps became the killing centres that have become symbols of the horror of the Holocaust. But the camps were neither a product of the Second World War nor of the Holocaust; they were much older. By the time Auschwitz was set up in 1940, the Dachau camp, the first to be established by the SS, had operated for more than seven years. The first camps were set up just weeks after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Yet while the history of the camps is, justifiably, dominated by their end, what about their beginnings?
This Research Grant project led by Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann examines the often neglected but crucial origins of the camp system in the pre-war years in Germany, examining its remarkably swift establishment, its function and its operation. The pre-war system was quite unlike the wartime one, with far fewer camps, prisoners and most notably few deaths and yet these camps left a crucial legacy for the infernal camps of the Second World War. This project offers important new conclusions about the motives of SS perpetrators, public knowledge of the camps as well as early abuses of Jewish prisoners and social outsiders.
The absence of accessible documentary material has contributed greatly to the widespread lack of knowledge about the pre-war Nazi concentration camps. Key documents are scattered across archives throughout the world, while most published survivors’ memoirs have long been forgotten or gone out of print. This project has collected more than 300 of these such documents and where necessary translated them into English. The resulting book, due to be published this year, will be a first as there is currently no edition, in any language, of documents from the pre-war Nazi camps.
The website for the project also brings together a selection of the documents, translated and original, drawn from various archives and libraries as well as images, audio lectures and suggestions for further reading.
This project has also led to the organisation of several international conferences and public lectures on the subject bringing together UK and German scholars and creating academic ties that will go far beyond this project.
A podcast by Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann can be found on the Wiener Library website.
The project website can be found at http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/.
Image: Camp street in Dachau, 1930s © The Wiener Library.