Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany is a 2004 book by Nikolaus Wachsmann, a modern European history professor. Wachsmann argues that the Nazi judiciary played a key role in Nazi terror. The prison systems inflicted harsh punishments against Jews, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses while enforcing Nazi racial policies. [1] Wachsmann describes how law enforcement promoted the Nazi and terror acts in Germany before and during World War II [2] and each chapter describes a specific topic relating to political prisoner terror. The book illuminates the bureaucratic and institutional history of prisons and the history of inmates themselves. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Democide is a term coined by American political scientist Rudolph Rummel to describe "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command." According to Rummel, this definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims, extrajudicial summary killings, and mass deaths due to governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines like the Holodomor, as well as killings by de facto governments, i.e. killings during a civil war. This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government.
Before 1933, homosexual acts were illegal in Germany under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The law was not consistently enforced, however, and a thriving gay culture existed in German cities. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, the first homosexual movement's infrastructure of clubs, organizations, and publications was shut down. After the Röhm purge in 1934, persecuting homosexuals became a priority of the Nazi police state. A 1935 revision of Paragraph 175 made it easier to bring criminal charges for homosexual acts, leading to a large increase in arrests and convictions. Persecution peaked in the years prior to World War II and was extended to areas annexed by Germany, including Austria, the Czech lands, and Alsace–Lorraine.
Oswald Ludwig Pohl was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. As the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office and the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps, he was a key figure in the Final Solution, the genocide of the European Jews.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.
Claudia Ann Koonz is an American historian of Nazi Germany. Koonz's critique of the role of women during the Nazi era, from a feminist perspective, has become a subject of much debate and research in itself. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award, and a National Book Award finalist. Koonz has appeared on the podcasts Holocaust, hosted by University of California Television, and Real Dictators, hosted by Paul McGann. In the months before the 2020 United States presidential election, Koonz wrote about the risks of autocracy in the United States for History News Network and the New School's Public Seminar.
Extermination through labour is a term that was adopted to describe forced labor in Nazi concentration camps in light of the high mortality rate and poor conditions; in some camps a majority of prisoners died within a few months. In the 21st century, research has questioned whether there was a general policy of extermination through labor in the Nazi concentration camp system because of widely varying conditions between camps. German historian Jens-Christian Wagner argues that the camp system involved the exploitation of forced labor of some prisoners and the systematic murder of others, especially Jews, with only limited overlap between these two groups.
The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich is a book by British historian Ian Kershaw that was first published in 1987.
Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung is a German term for the idea that a family or clan shares the responsibility for a crime or act committed by one of its members, justifying collective punishment. As a legal principle, it was derived from Germanic law in the Middle Ages, usually in the form of fines and compensations. It was adopted by Nazi Germany to justify the punishment of kin for the offence of a family member. Punishment often involved imprisonment and execution, and was applied to relatives of the conspirators of the failed 1944 bomb plot to assassinate Hitler.
A Sondergericht was a German "special court". After taking power in 1933, the Nazis quickly moved to remove internal opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany. The legal system became one of many tools for this aim and the Nazis gradually supplanted the normal justice system with political courts with wide-ranging powers. The function of the special courts was to intimidate the German public, but as they expanded their scope and took over roles previously done by ordinary courts such as Amtsgerichte this function became diluted.
The Concentration Camps Inspectorate (CCI) or in German, IKL was the central SS administrative and managerial authority for the concentration camps of the Third Reich. Created by Theodor Eicke, it was originally known as the "General Inspection of the Enhanced SS-Totenkopfstandarten", after Eicke's position in the SS. It was later integrated into the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office as "Amt D".
Nikolaus Daniel Wachsmann is a professor of modern European history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Hitler's Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg is a 2010 book by Canadian historian Valerie Hébert dealing with the High Command Trial of 1947–1948. The book covers the criminal case against the defendants, all high-ranking officers of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, as well as the wider societal and historical implications of the trial. The book received generally positive reviews for its mastery of the subject and thorough assessment of the legacy of the trial.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps is a 2015 book by Birkbeck College professor Nikolaus Wachsmann.
Shlomo Aronson was an Israeli historian and professor of political science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Frederic Spotts is an American former diplomat and cultural historian. He was educated in Swarthmore College, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Oxford University.
The early camps were extrajudicial sites of detention established in Nazi Germany in 1933. Although the system was mostly dismantled by the end of the year, these camps were the precursor of the Nazi concentration camps.
Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories is a collection of essays on aspects of the Nazi concentration camps, edited by Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann. It was published by Routledge in 2009.
The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps is a book by Michael Thad Allen which focuses on the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office and its role in the Nazi concentration camps and slave labor of Nazi Germany.
The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 is the second of two volumes on the political and diplomatic history of Europe between the World Wars and is part of The Oxford History of Modern Europe series.
Edward B. Westermann is a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University–San Antonio.