Language:
English
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of Contemporary History
Angaben zur Quelle:
45,3 (2010) 576-600
Keywords:
Jews History 1933-1939
;
Nazi concentration camps
Abstract:
Before the "Kristallnacht" pogrom of 1938, Jews did not constitute a special category in the Nazi concentration camps, but their numbers were disproportionately large. Discusses three waves of arrests of Jews. In the first, following the Reichstag fire, Jews were arrested as political enemies, for alleged "criminal business practice", or for race defilement, although the Nuremberg laws were not yet promulgated. In 1935 the Nazis began arrests of Jewish returning émigrés, whose number had risen. In summer 1938 many Jews fell victim to the Action Workshy Reich, during which they were arrested as "asocials". Within Nazi camp populations, Jews held the status of outcasts among outcasts. They suffered harsher treatment, and while non-Jewish prisoners were expected to be re-educated and re-integrated into German society, no such re-integration awaited the Jewish prisoner. Argues that the concentration camps of 1933-38 helped to turn a minority group into an outsider group; they defined the Jews as the nation's enemy, "legitimized" police measures against them, and thus paved the way for mass murder.
DOI:
10.1177/0022009410366556
URL:
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