The People and the Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany

Although the Nazi concentration camps are comprehensively studied in the historiography, there has been no book-length treatment of the German people's relationship with them. This is the first such study in any language. Previous studies have examined the relationship between individual camps and their immediate vicinity, but this book also looks at opinion and attitudes towards the camps at a national level. It traces the changing nature and extent of contacts between the camps and the public, in terms of media representations, informal discussions between ordinary Germans, and the impact of direct experiences of the camps. Propaganda dealing with the concentration camps, in the print media but also in media previously neglected in this context such as theatre, film and art, is analysed. For the first time, this book also considers German perceptions of concentration camps outside Germany, bringing this into the picture to examine how comparisons between Nazi and non-Nazi deployment of concentration camps affected reactions to domestic practice within Germany.This book offers a fresh perspective on Nazi Germany by demonstrating how fully the camps were integrated into society, and how pervasive knowledge of the institutions was, across the lifetime of the “Third Reich”. It reveals that simple dichotomies of consensus and coercion fail to capture the complexity of reactions to the concentration camps, at either an individual or a societal level.