The Concentration Camps and Antisemitic Terror: New Research on Jews in Nazi Germany
The history of the Nazi concentration camps has long been dominated by the legacies of the Holocaust, the wartime genocide of the Jews of Europe. In her talk, Kim Wünschmann will re-evaluate this history and focus on the pre-war years of camp terror and antisemitic persecution. While historians acknowledge that Jews were taken into concentration camps from early on, they have not yet dealt systematically with this specific form of discrimination. Other forms of exclusion like street violence, day-to-day discrimination, anti-Jewish legislation, as well as economic boycotts, and expropriations dominate the historiographical picture.
Based on her award-winning study Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps, Kim Wünschmann will explore the instrumental role of the early concentration camps in the development of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies. Investigating more than a dozen camps, from Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, the talk will analyse a process of terror meant to identify and isolate Jews from German society. It will examine the function of terror in this process of turning ‘Germans’ into ‘Jews’ and forcing them into emigration. It also investigates Jewish responses and resistance to this most brutal form of exclusion.