University of London, Birkbeck College
Jewish Prisoners in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–1939
Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious SS concentration camp—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. This study unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extra-legal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies towards Jews and in plans to create a ‘racially pure’ Third Reich.
Investigating more than a dozen camps, from Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, the project uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The camp system was essential to a regime then testing the limits of its power and seeking to capture the hearts and minds of the German public. Propagandized by the Nazis as enemies of the state, Jews were often targeted for arbitrary arrest and then routinely subjected to the harshest treatment and most punishing labour assignments in the camps. A proportionally high number of Jewish prisoners were murdered.
Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, the study explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.
Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, comics and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich.
Her publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, the Prix Fondation Auschwitz – Jacques Rozenberg, and the Herbert Steiner Prize of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (DÖW). She is also the co-editor, together with Christoher Dillon, of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and, together with Stefanie Fischer, co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) and awarded Silver in the International Creative Media Award (ICMA) in the category of Concept and Innovation.