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Goeschel, Christian, and Wachsmann, Nikolaus. The Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-1939: A Documentary History. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 448 pp. $65.
Histories of the Nazi concentration camps have mainly focused on the last and most tragic years of World War II. But, as modern European historians Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann argue in The Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-1939: A Documentary History, the camps were created neither by World War II nor by the Holocaust. Ihey were first set up in 1 933, soon after Adolf Hitler's appointment as Germany's chancellor, as places of confinement for political enemies, mostly German Communist sympathizers. Almost all prisoners survived the prewar camps. Mass detentions and exterminations started along with the war. A systematic examination of these early and less-known fixtures of the Third Reich, relying on primary documents from the camps, helps reveal the thinking of the Nazi leadership and explain the atrocities committed later in the concentration camp system.
'Ihe primary sources in this volume include official SS documents and speeches, Nazi legal files and trial records, articles in Nazi and foreign newspapers, secret police reports, and accounts by former prisoners. Ihe volume is thematically grouped in six chapters, the last one being of most interest to journalism historians, as it focuses on the portrayal of the camps in Nazi propaganda and the foreign press. Each chapter and subsection starts with an introduction of the historical context...