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The Ukrainian humanitarian intellectuals became the object of the totalitarian regime repressions at the end of 1920–1930s. Ordinary social conditions of cultural life centers changed drastically. Even harsher conditions waited for the repressed humanitarian intellectuals — the conditions of Stalin’s GULAG prisons, concentration camps, and an exile. The survival strategies at GULAG’s extreme conditions had many differences and yet had common features. The subject matter of this article is an daily routine of the Ukrainian humanitarian intellectuals in 1930s. The objective of this research is to reflect upon the everyday life of well-known Ukrainian scientists, professorshumanitarians Stephan Taranushenko, Vasyl Dubriovskyi, Dmytro Gordieiev, and Vsevolod Zummer, who at different times were connected to Kyiv and its scientific environment. They met at BAMLAG (Urulha, Svobodniy) — where they were constructing the Baukal-Amur highway and two ways of Transsyb. Social transformations in the concentration camp had a sweeping character. But the Ukrainian humanitarians worked hard, under the psychological and ideological pressure, to the extent possible were doing art as well. The humanitarians of those days were forced to show their loyalty to the totalitarian regime. The sources for this paper are not only Vasyl Dubrovskyi’s memorials of concentration camp but also the documents and memoirs of Ivan Chystyakov, who at that time was a commander of BAMLAG security division. It was reflected how the prisoners were forced to a more productive work. The camp administration used food and the early release conditions to achieve that. The conclusion was the next — the Ukrainian professors managed to survive and left BAMLAG before the date due.

The article analyzes the sanitary and hygienic conditions of living and medical care at Konzentrationslager Stutthof — Aussenlager Pölitz — a branch of the Stutthof central camp. The sub-camp in Police was created with a view to supplying cheap labour to a synthetic gasoline fac-tory, which was a strategic plant of the German war economy. The health condition of prisoners in concentration camps always remained bad, but the health problems of the prisoners in Police resulted not only from terrible sanitary, hygienic, and living conditions, but also from the difficult working conditions in the factory. So far, the issues of interest to us have not found wider interest among researchers who focused on the so-called “Camps”, apart from the so-called small — affiliate camps. The following research questions were asked: How did medical care function in the German (Nazi) sub-camp Konzentrationslager Stutthof — Aussenlager Pölitz? What were the sanitary, living and hygienic conditions in the German (Nazi) sub-camp Konzentrationslager Stutthof — Aussen-lager Pölitz? In preparing this article the author used research methods characteristic for historical sciences, such as external and internal evaluation of sources; the dogmatic method, which seeks casual connections of a more complex nature than simple time-related connections, and comparative research. The analysis was based on archival materials of the Institute of National Remembrance, es-pecially the Archives of the Branch Office of the Commission For the Prosecution of Crimes Against The Polish Nation of the Institute of National Remembrance in Szczecin (primarily testimony re-ports and witness accounts, factual documentation), memories and literature of the subject (Polish, German, and English). Based on the source material and subject literature it was proved that: 1) The way the sub-camp in Pölitz operated depended on the requirements of the German arms industry. It was created to provide cheap labor for a synthetic fuel factory (Chemische Werke Hydropetroleum Industrie Gesellschaft), a strategic plant for the German war industry. 2) Prisoners of concentration camps were never in good health, but health problems of prisoners in Pölitz were caused not only by poor sanitation, hygiene, and living conditions, but also by harsh working conditions in the factory. 3) The health conditions developed by prisoners from the KL Stutthof — Aussenlager Pölitz could be divided into 4 groups: a) illnesses related to the living conditions in the camp, typical for most concentration camps, b) illnesses resulting from hunger and total exhaustion, c) injuries caused by beating, and d) illnesses resulting from workplace contamination. The operation of the Pölitz camp could be divided into two periods: one when the camp (at that time “the summer camp”) was still under construction, and the other — its actual operation — when the winter camp was established with extended camp infrastructure. However, regardless of the time, prisoners always suffered from hunger, exhausting work beyond their capabilities and various illnesses.

In Holocaust discourse, Muselmanner are commonly depicted as mute, passive prisoners fated to die. We identify alternative representations in works of Jorge Semprun and Imre Kertesz but also in a g...

A study of the ‘female Muselmann’ is long overdue. Here I question the male figure of the Muselmann as a universal trope of concentration camp debasement, by examining it through a gendered lens. T...

The phenomenon Muselmann was a peculiarity of Nazi concentration camps. In survivor’s testimonies, the term appears frequently enough to assume that it denotes a particular, commonly recognized cat...

We have been interested in the figure of the Muselmann for a long time. While ubiquitous in survivor testimonies, these concentration camp prisoners – routinely described as being between life and ...

The author compares 12 concentration camp systems, from US camps in the Philippines (1901–1902) to Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995). He uses comparative history for macro-causal analysis, discusses the challenges in defining concentration camps, and compares camps with other institutions. Some of the features outlined in the paper can be found in all concentration camps (forceful isolation of masses of people in accord with a “collectivist logic”, power, and cruelty), while others are limited to certain sub-types (forced labor, medical experiments). The author proves that concentration camps were predominantly a tool that was intended to help win wars, reinforce and stabilize power, and create a new, obedient form of citizen. Therefore, camps were one of the many methods used to pacify hostile populations and internal opposition. At the same time, their potential became apparent and led to the rise and spread of absolute power structures.

The crimes committed in Germany's name by a minority of the population remain a mark of Cain on the national psyche, accepted by some and resented by others. This chapter shows that constant confrontation with the Nazi period and neo-Nazis on the one hand, and with the witness of the people and peoples who suffered for the Nazi ideology on the other. Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland throughout its occupation by the Nazis, said, before his execution for war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946, when he appeared to take some responsibility for his actions: 'A thousand years will pass without taking this guilt away from Germany'. The sites of the major concentration camps in Germany, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Sachsenhausen are national memorials to the victims; buildings and barracks have been made into museums, and their historical context and the crimes committed there are explained in the plainest of language.

This paper is about Aboriginal peoples' strategies and actions to forge meaningful lives for themselves in the face of the enormous pressures of colonialism. Its focus is on land, and particularly those small areas in south-eastern Australia which became 'Aboriginal Reserve. To speak of reserves as the result of Aboriginal strategies seems incongruous: most Aboriginal speakers today are adamant that the reserves were concentration camps where, no matter how they might have felt about the land itself, their experience was of unrelenting segregation, repression and cultural assault by the agents of the government.

During the National Socialist dictatorship, SS and police forces made frequent use of the phrase ‘shot while trying to escape’ to describe the killing of the regime's putative political and racial ...

Jehovah's Witnesses in countries under Nazi rule refused to participate in war-related activities in any way. Consequently, unless they abjured their religion, they were subject to severe penalties. Between 6,700 and 7,000 were sent to concentration camps. In contrast to Jewish Holocaust survivors, not much research has been conducted on this group. The present study used thematic content analysis to assess patterns of universal values, coping strategies, and resolutions of psychosocial crises as these were manifested in the memoirs and interviews of 62 Jehovah's Witness survivors of the camps, and compared those with the counterpart results of interviews with 58 Jewish survivors recorded in 1946. The results show differences tentatively attributable to the relative status of the Witnesses and Jews in Nazi ideology and in the lifestyles and religious beliefs of the two groups. Further research, with larger sample sizes, is needed for definitive conclusions to be drawn.

This article sheds new light on the development of concentration camps in colonial warfare in the longue duree from 1868 to 1974. Introducing different examples of forced removal and deportation in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the analysis emphasizes their interrelation, highlighting possible transfers of knowledge that have been neglected in comparative discussions. Specifically, the article reassesses the Cuban experience of concentrating civilians in times of war (1868–98); it critically evaluates Spain’s forgotten concentration camps on the Canary Islands, which emerged during the Ifni-Sahara war of 1957–58; and it focuses on both the theory of revolutionary warfare and the practice of so-called strategic resettlement in the long and protracted Portuguese colonial wars in Africa (1961–74). In particular, the camps on the Canary Islands suggest the need for an analytical distinction between the function of forced removals in counter-guerrilla warfare and administrative internment; they a...

Under Nazi rule, tens of thousands of men and women, boys and girls were detained in penitentiaries, workhouses or concentration camps, or eventually killed, on the grounds that they were deemed ‘asocial’. The way they lived did not conform to Nazi notions of being a productive, valuable, well-adjusted member of the German Volksgemeinschaft (the German ethnic community). The article examines whether, when and how the Federal Republic of Germany has come to terms with the Nazi persecution of the ‘asocials’ and taken measures of compensation or commemoration. It shows that German politics has largely failed to confront the distinctive features of this type of persecution, namely that it targeted victims according to Nazi notions of productivity, economic usefulness and social conformism. It argues that the Federal Republic has failed to declare the logic of this persecution to be incompatible with its normative foundations. The article focuses on the activities by the German Bundestag pertaining to the persecution of the ‘asocials’. Source material consists of draft laws, parliamentary motions, parliamentary hearings, plenary debates, questions to the government in writing and government responses to these. It concludes that the Federal Republic of Germany has failed to distance itself from the productivist logic that underlay the Nazi persecution of the ‘asocials’.

The present study aims to shed light on the existence of a relationship, not always obvious, yet undeniable, between law and literature. Although for decades law has been portrayed as sterile, free from moral or practical considerations and totally indifferent to each instance coming from the literary world, literature is full of legal implications and dimensions. I will focus on the literary production of Vasily Grossman because he represents a constant reminder of the violations of human rights in the twentieth century, and not only in the Soviet Union. He was one of the first to equate the horrors of the concentration camps to the gulags – Hitler to Stalin – to show that in every form of totalitarianism there is the total negation of man, the attempt to annihilate individual, moral, and legal identity, to which he referred as “the pervasiveness of evil”. According to the Russian writer, the only alternative to Absolute Evil (e. g. the persistent violation of human dignity) is striving towards a senseless, illogical, unreasonable metaphysical good. However, the kindness, Grossman notes, ought to save man. He thus begins an excruciating search for “the man inside man”. Every decision, every behavior of the characters in his works, reflects an ethical dimension, or rather results in an ethical choice. So, totalitarian regimes, through a war fought by any possible means, end up destroying the freedom of the individual. In this paper I will argue that throughout the literary production of the Russian writer, there are unresolved issues regarding the relationship between right and evil as well as between freedom and good.

On 20 August 1947, the United States Military Tribunal condemned sixteen persons in Nuremberg for crimes committed in the name of science in several concentration camps. Moving away from a dichotomous stance delineating true science/false science, the judges were able to outline ten ethical and legal principles to regulate all clinical experiments, which were subsequently known as the Nuremberg Code. Where most of legal commentaries focus on the mere reading of these ten principles, this paper will highlight some of the steps in the legal journey of the American judges. We will see that, unfortunately, they failed to address one of the most difficult issues in clinical trials and human experimentation: the almost unavoidable context of exploitation of any situation where a person is used as an object for the good of others.

The article considers destinies of medics residing in Nazi Germany and invaded countries. They took no participation in resistance but they were annihilated mainly in ghettos and concentration camps. The particular attention is paid to physicians, including the field of neurological sciences, left memories of themselves in the form of eponym names. These eponyms are to be applied in practical activities. The information is cited concerning inhuman programs of sterilization and euthanasia existed in Nazi Germany. It is emphasized that these programs occurred not in empty place because background of their development existed before Nazi came into power and the uSA included. And at that, experiments with prisoners continued to be implemented in the uSA even after the Second world war. The article draws attention to the importance of ethic aspects in activities of medics.

Following chronologically from the previous chapter, Chap. 4 examines attitudes towards German POWs and their treatment between June 1944 and May 1945. This period witnessed the war against Germany turn in favour of the Allies, leading to the downfall of the Nazi regime in May 1945. It begins with and analysis of the capture and transportation of German POWs from the Normandy beachhead to Britain which formed part of the reportage of the invasion, feeding into the narrative of success. Rather than arriving as invaders as they had prospectively been in 1940, German soldiers entered Britain defeated captives. Again, the public came into close contact with the POWs at the dockside, on the railways and in the streets where they lived. The public met them with the same mixture of curiosity and indifference as they had done earlier in the war. Another factor distinguished this period of the war. In May 1944, the shooting of 50 RAF officers from Stalag Luft III was announced. This was the first instance where the brutality of the Nazi regime, usually reserved for the racial enemies of Hitler, had been directed towards British POWs. While British POWs had been subjected to substandard conditions aboard the Altmark and placed in manacles during the Shackling Crisis, they had not been executed. The culpability of the German people in the act was debated, yet there were no calls for reciprocity in the treatment of German POWs. Debates in the press remained similar to that of 1939–44. On the one hand, realist voices emphasising the brutality of the German people considered the treatment of German POWs soft, or unnecessarily superior to the level dictated by international law. On the other, liberal voices defended the civil treatment of German POWs and criticised any suggestion of straying from international law; this would only result in a compromise of British values, descending to the level of the enemy. Moreover, these defenders of the British tradition of treating POWs well made a definite distinction between the German people and the Nazi leadership which had misled them. Therefore, the rank-and-file German POWs were exonerated from the atrocities committed by their masters; they were soldiers doing their duty like British servicemen. With the liberation of Belsen in April 1945, and the widespread disclosure after British soldiers entered the site of the horrors perpetrated in concentration camps, the liberal voices defending German POWs and their treatment grew quiet, with realist voices emphasising the unjustly soft treatment of German POWs. In the wake of Belsen, there was little concern with the stipulations of the 1929 Geneva Convention. Instead, calls to set German POWs to work dominated public discussion.

The riveting and richly illustrated paper about fateful events that brought together three courageous Poles, officers of the Polish underground, fighting Nazis and trying desperately to stop atrocities being committed at Auschwitz. The main character of the story is Witold Pilecki, an officer of the Polish underground who volunteered for the underground mission to infiltrate the Nazi concentration camps and provide reports about these camps. He allowed himself to be captured by the Nazis in one of the many round-ups of the Polish civilian populations and spent three years in Auschwitz, organizing resistance and smuggling our short reports about the atrocities being committed there. Pilecki finally managed to escape in early 1943 and was in urgent need of hiding. He found such hiding at the home of Tomasz and Ludmila Serafinski, known as Koryznowka. Tomasz and Ludmila, husband and wife, both were officers of the Polish underground. They hid Pilecki for over three months in their home, helped him to evade the Nazis, allowed him to recover his strength and to write his first comprehensive reports which were smuggled to London and Washington. All three became close friends. In an unusual twist, Pilecki, when he volunteered for his mission, Pilecki assumed a false identity and passed himself as “Tomasz Serfinski”. As it happened, both man fought German invasion of Poland and were defending Warsaw in 1939, where wounded Serafinski lost his identity documents. Pilecki found them and assuming that Serafinski died, took Serafinski’ s name and identity and was imprisoned in Auschwitz as “Tomasz Serafinski.” By sheer accident, Serafinski was the commanding officer of the underground post near the escape route of Pilecki and that is how the two men finally met. At the end, all of these heroic people, paid a very heavy price for their courageous actions.

The Schutzstaffel coerced and enlisted detainees into the administration of the labor and death camps. These detainees were called Kapos. The Kapos constitute a particularly contested element of Holocaust remembrance. Some Kapos deployed their situational authority to ease the conditions of other prisoners, while others acted cruelly and committed abuses. This chapter explores one treatment of the Kapo, this being on stage: Kapo Be’Yerushalaim (Kapo in Jerusalem) (play, 2014 Motti Lerner; Hebrew, translated into English by Roy Isacowitz, derivative of a film of the same title). This chapter considers how this play speaks of victims who victimize others and narrates the pain that results. Recounting the story that this play tells—a very powerful one, forcefully voiced, of law, judgment, suicide, shame, and the deployment of violence to supposedly protect others—serves as a collected ‘picture book’ of the potential and limits of international law.

Until 2005, the protocols of the meetings of the Odesa Provincial Commission Extraordinary Committee were kept in the archive unit of the Office of the Security Service of Ukraine in Odesa oblast as "completely secret" and were not issued to researchers. In 2005, these documents were transferred to the Branch State Archive of the SBU. The archival and investigative cases, which are in temporary storage in the archival unit of the Ukrainian Security Service in Odessa Oblast, belong to two funds: "Main" and "Suspended". There are no descriptions of these funds, so the exact number of cases that they contain is unknown. Until 2015, the cases of the "Main" fund have not been available to researchers; access to the "Suspended" fund cases was limited and complicated. The main thesis of the article is that without the study of these archival materials, a comprehensive analysis of political terror is impossible. Of particular importance are the minutes of the meetings of the OHNK Board, which cover the period from February 28, 1920 to March 25, 1922. They include four main categories: "Present", "Reviewed", "Resolved" and "Marked as completed". The list of the present persons included the head of the OHNK, the secretary and members of the OHNK board. In the category "Reviewed", the full name, patronymic of the person, and their age were indicated. The obligatory attribute of this part of the protocol was the indication of what the particular person or group of individuals were accused of. The category "Resolved" contained the surname and initials of the person with their sentence. The last category, “Marked as completed” contained information on the implementation of the board decision. The basis of the sources are archival and investigative cases of the "Main" and "Suspended" funds, which include materials that were mandatory to be included in each case and variable materials. Almost without exception, each case has an arrest warrant. The ruling contained the charges against the arrested person. On the day of the decision statement, a questionnaire was filled in which were indicated the name, surname and patronymic, citizenship, nationality, place of residence, age or birth year, education, family composition, party affiliation, profession and membership in the trade union with indication of the number ticket, place of work, property status, when and by whom was arrested and the warrant number, place of arrest, when and by whom was questioned, whether the charges were brought, the place of residence before arrest, etc. As a rule, all archival and investigative cases contain protocols of interrogations of arrested persons and witnesses, sometimes confrontations. Of particular importance are personal archival and investigative cases, which were grouped into two group cases No. 14759-p and No. 27120-p, which show the consequences of the terror against the members of the "Polish military organization". And the cases 12006-p and 5522-p show how terror affected the members of the Odessa Committee of the RSDLP (m). The archival materials of the former punitive bodies of the communist regime form the basis of the study of political terror in 1920–1922, since they provide the opportunity to establish the surnames, names and patronymics of persons against whom the decisions were taken regarding capital punishment, imprisonment in concentration camps for varying periods, and other penalties and determine the total number of such persons. In addition, archival and investigative cases reveal the tragic fate of a each particular person and, at the same time, the tragedy of the entire Ukrainian people who find themselves in unnatural conditions of sociopolitical and economic existence.

The objective of this article is the analysis of the humanitarian relief work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the League of the Red Cross Societies through a joint body, the Joint Relief Committee (JRC), in France during the Second World War. Based on the treaties, convention and draft projects that shed light on the evolution and consolidation of the International Humanitarian Law relating to civilian defence and on the specialized bibliography, reports of the ICRC and the JRC, documentary sources of the ICRC Archives, and photo library of the same organization, the article focuses on humanitarian aid and priorities of the JRC in favour of the civilian population most vulnerable to and affected by war: children, women and internees in the concentration camps in South of France. This study, accompanied by photos, maps and quantitative data, sheds light on the channels of humanitarian action, the charitable organizations, associations, institutions, foundations, etc., that made this possible, as well as the loopholes and limitations of international humanitarian law, with important consequences for human life during a major conflict such as the Second World War. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo el análisis de la labor humanitaria desarrollada por el Comité Internacional de la Cruz Roja (CICR) y la Liga de Sociedades de la Cruz Roja a través de un organismo conjunto, la Comisión Mixta de Socorro de la Cruz Roja internacional (CMS), en Francia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. En base a tratados, convenciones y proyectos que arrojan luz sobre la evolución y la consolidación del Derecho Internacional Humanitario en materia de protección civil y según la bibliografía especializada, informes del CICR y de la CMS, material documental y fotográfico de los archivos del CICR, el artículo se centra en el análisis de la ayuda humanitaria de la CMS en Francia a favor de la población civil más vulnerable y afectada por la guerra, como niños, mujeres e internados en los campos de concentración del sur de Francia. Este estudio, acompañado de fotografías, mapas y datos cuantitativos de la ayuda humanitaria, nos permite arrojar luz sobre los canales de la acción humanitaria, las organizaciones caritativas, las instituciones, las asociaciones o los comités de ayuda que lo hicieron posible, así como las lagunas y las limitaciones del Derecho Internacional Humanitario, con importantes consecuencias para la vida humana durante un conflicto de envergadura, como la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

On March 7, 1933, Nazi paramilitary troops raided a progressive school in Oberhambach, Germany, ostensibly seeking Communist party literature. The Nazis’ ultimate goal was a greater one, however. Co-opting the Odenwald School, at the time world-famous in educational circles, along with its charismatic founder and director, Paul Geheeb, would have been a propaganda coup, placing the National Socialists at the vanguard of a reformist movement that had up until then been fundamentally opposed to Nazi principles. Geheeb—pacifist, feminist, and anti-authoritarian—faced a choice between maintaining his school and maintaining his principles. When he was ordered not to resign or shut down the school, on pain of seeing himself and the Jewish family he had married into sent off to concentration camps, the dilemma was complete. That he was able to finesse this seemingly impossible situation, eventually landing in Switzerland with a group of students and teachers to continue his life’s mission, was in large measure due to his success in instilling anti-authoritarian values in the children with whom he worked. This case study tells of a leader who despised obedience getting the better of a regime that saw obedience to the Fuhrer (Leader) as the supreme virtue.

On October 26, 1946 an American military tribunal was formed to judge those responsible for the medical experiments that had been conducted under the National Socialist regime. The doctors’ trial was the first of twelve trials called “Subsequent Proceedings” or “Proceedings Involving Various Groups of Professionals” that took place in Nuremberg following the trials of Nazi war criminals who had been brought before the International Military Tribunal. As far as the medical experiments are concerned, it is worthy of note that eye-witness testimonies confirm their reality. For the Nazis killing was considered a “merciful death” and not murder; the eradication of all “pathogens” was permitted for reasons of empathy, as in the struggle for survival. The unscientific nature of the Nazi experiments is all the more surprising in that they pursued a goal that was directly associated with the war.

The article focuses on the Soviet citizenship obtaining by Spanish immigrants who arrived in the Soviet Union during and after the Civil War (1936-1939), ended in the defeat of the Republicans. The article addresses the status before the acquisition of nationality under the laws of the Soviet Union, and especially the process of taking Soviet citizenship, complicated by several factors. Among these factors, the author identifies the causes of age (“Spanish children”), personal (in the case of Spanish pilots interned in French concentration camps or remained on the territory of the USSR at the end of training in Kirovabad flight school) and external (the influence of the Spanish Communist Party, the Soviet bureaucracy) character. In this connection, also raises indirectly the question of citizenship compliance received by the Spaniards, to the basic law that governed the rights and duties of Soviet citizens - 1936 Soviet Constitution.

In 1945 and under the pseudonym Sjahrazad, Indonesia's first prime minister Sutan Sjahrir and his wife Maria Duchâteau published a book in Dutch entitled Indonesian Contemplations about Sjahrir's exile to and incarceration in the 1930s in the Dutch colonial concentration camp Boven-Digoel. Through an analysis of the book's critique of the legal spatialities of the Dutch empire and its imagination of the space of the Indonesian nation-state, this article makes a double argument: on the one hand, for the importance of scholarly analyses of Indonesian writing on the Dutch colonial-legal project and, on the other, against the idea that national liberation and international human rights were mutually exclusive in anticolonial nationalism.

This article has two goals. The first is to challenge the cliche (outside Italy) of the cowardly and clownish Italian soldier by recalling the voluntary journey to concentration camps (Lagers) of 650,000 soldiers and officers, the so-called Italian Military Internees (IMI), who said ‘No!’ to the German ‘invitation’ to swear an oath of loyalty to the Reich upon the declaration of the armistice on 8 September 1943. Despite a reign of terror in the Lagers in which they were interned, most continued to resist until they died or were repatriated at the end of the war. The second goal is to examine the idiosyncratic evocation of officers’ experience as IMI by Giovannino Guareschi in his Diario clandestino (1949). He played a major role in the IMIs’ ‘unarmed resistance’ in the four Lagers in which he was interned and the work consists mostly of material written in situ for his companions in misfortune.

The modern city, differing from other human settlements, moreover from all other habitats, is wholly organized in order to response to only one species’ -homo sapiens’- needs and desires. This exceptional habitat has also been a socio-spatial organization (re)stabilizing upon mechanisms of discipline, order, inclusion / exclusion, and clearance. The safety and security polity of the modern city, which serves to its imagined, conceived and desired - yet formal and shallow - sterility, dispatches systematically the excommunicated to the margins and / or to camps. Other animals are obviously the most invisible, most disposable and marginalized, and most silenced subjects of those mechanisms. This paper deals with one of those disposable subjects, stray dogs, in the context of a relatively new exclusion / clearance policy of urban municipalities in İstanbul -that is deportation and dumping of stray dogs to the surrounding forests. Considering the more recent local governmental projects to establish huge “concentration camps” at the outskirts of the metropolitan area, the study consequently tries to reexamine this policy of deportation as an undeclared provisional practice for an ultimate total displacement, relocation, and absolute insulation of stray animals.

This article provides a reassessment of what is referred to as the second phase of the Armenian genocide, emphasizing the role of an Armenian-led humanitarian network in saving thousands of lives. The scholarship (and the popular discourse) on humanitarian efforts during the Genocide focuses on western missionaries and consuls, who emerge as selfless heroes protecting and saving hundreds of thousands of helpless Armenians. Armenian agency is neglected. Here, it is argued that it was the Ottoman Armenians who drove this humanitarian resistance waged in the Ottoman Empire. Western humanitarianism provided tremendous material and moral support, yet it was the Armenians themselves who led the resistance effort and shouldered the larger share of the burden, distributing humanitarian aid and funds to deportees huddled in church and school courtyards and, ultimately, in concentration camps – despite the dangers involved. This Armenian-led humanitarian resistance network comprised of church committees, influential Armenian dignitaries, doctors, and nurses, as well as missionaries and local Muslims and Christians helped anchor and support thousands in Aleppo in 1915-1916, and saved the lives of thousands of others elsewhere in Syria. Cet article propose un réexamen de ce qu’il est devenu d’usage de nommer la seconde phase du génocide de 1915-1916, à travers l’étude des réseaux humanitaires mis en place et animés par des Arméniens. Alors que la littérature sur le sujet et les discours publics tendent à ne retenir que la participation des consuls et missionnaires occidentaux au sauvetage de centaines de milliers d’Arméniens démunis, cet article vise à mettre en lumière l’apport des acteurs arméniens eux-mêmes à ce gigantesque effort, malgré les dangers encourus et jusque dans les camps de concentration de Syrie.

Este artículo propone una reflexión en torno a lo que el historiador Saul Friedländer dio en llamar “los límites de la representación” de las masacres y los genocidios, con el objetivo de aportar pruebas que contribuyan a zanjar el viejo debate sobre la irrepresentabilidad del Holocausto. Para lograrlo, se realizará un análisis textual de cinco de las imágenes más dolorosas que la fotógrafa americana Lee Miller realizara en los campos de concentración nazis de Buchenwald y Dachau, en abril de 1945. La corresponsal de guerra, quien llegó a ser asistente de fotografía, musa y amante de Man Ray, presenció el horror, y si supo representarlo fue, en gran parte, gracias a su mirada surrealista.

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.

The concept of performance in the concentration camps is not a new one. Rovit and Goldfarb (1999) have chronicled a range of inmate performances from the cabarets of Theresienstadt to the variety shows at Auschwitz-Birkenau, created for many diverse reasons. Yet since the liberation of the camps there has been virtually no theatrical performance in these sites of memory. The very notion is generally seen as taboo, but the reasons for this are somewhat vague and appear to centre around the widespread idea of performance as ‘frivolous’; to perform within a concentration camp would be to somehow deface Holocaust memory and mock the suffering of those imprisoned there. Such ‘profane’ performance can be located within the ‘selfie’ photographs of tourists visiting the camps. But what of the daily shows that take place in the guise of guided tours – ‘sacred’ performances? What makes these performances acceptable to the public and the camp authorities, when theatrical performances are not? Can there ever ...

This article seeks to provide insight into the reach and meaning of the work of the Sonderkommando 1005, a unit that was tasked with covering up the evidence of mass murder in Eastern Europe between the fall of 1942 and September 1944. The operation, which was initiated by Paul Blobel, sought to destroy the bodies of victims killed in concentration camps and the “Holocaust by Bullets.”The author details the steps of the operation, both within the chain of command and among decision-making bodies, and discusses a few local specificities as well as the operation’s wide-ranging scope. Nevertheless, there are very few sources on the subject. This Aktion remains a poorly understood facet of Holocaust history, which contributes to the veil of secrecy the Nazis wanted to draw over the massacres and the operation itself.

In her edited collection, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps, Michaela Wolf, Associate Professor at Graz University, highlights the importance of language and interpreting in the context of e...

The term “genocide” was originally coined by Lemkin just after the horrendous crimes committed against innocent civilians in Nazi Germany. At that moment, the SS officials disposed of a systemic rationalized system of death which was oriented to domesticate and eradicate the “inferior” or the undesired “Other”. The concentration camps were space of torture, violence, death and mourning that marked the state of Israel forever. Today things have changed a lot, and the state of Israel is accused of violating the human rights in Palestine. While we review the discussion of senior lecturers such as Slavoj Žižek, Richard Bernstein, Norman Finkelstein and Yakov Rabkin, we reconstruct the philosophical touchstone that led a nomad tribe to become a state. This chapter deals not only with the sense of prophesy in Israel, but also it toys with the belief that the messianic idea of Messiah played a leading role in our appetite for consuming the Others’ death.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, socialists and communists shared a theoretical viewpoint deriving from Marxism and the bipolar line that emerged from the Cold War. In that time, they took a position of harsh criticism against the United States, against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and against the Christian Democrat government that in Italy led the inclusion of the country in the Western bloc. The two parties of Marxist tradition failed to elaborate a statement or a historiographical reflection on anti-Semitism, as demonstrated by two authoritative sources: the party press and the contribution of intellectuals who in that first decade of republican Italy had had a role and visibility of great importance. In both cases, the interpretation of anti-Semitism was crushed onto that of anti-fascism: concerned with presenting themselves to the public and the world, as the protagonists of the anti-fascist struggle and the rebirth of democracy, socialists and communists, and above all the latter, did not deal with the reasons for, causes, or the outcomes of the persecution of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s or the anti-Semitic demonstrations in the USSR of the 1950s. In some cases, the theme fell under the ax of silence, in others it was presented in an ambiguous way, as one of the many forms of Nazi-fascist violence. In this way, talking about concentration camps meant dealing with places of detention for the persecuted, without dwelling on the fact that the reason for the persecution and the Shoah was racial rather than political. This difficulty in analyzing anti-Semitism, in recognizing its specificity, without including it in the great container of anti-fascism, was expressed in the same years in which left-wing intellectuals and politicians spoke about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Despite daunting circumstances, history is full of stories of men and women incarcerated by the Nazis, who risked their lives to save others. In some cases, the moral dilemma faced by these people presented an unquestionable challenge-particularly for those in the medical profession who had taken an oath to save life. This paper presents the dramatic stories of Dr. Gisella Perl and Dr. Erno Vadasz. Although their choices were markedly different, their goals were the same-to save as many lives as possible.

This article analyses newspapers’ discourse in supporting of the last Argentinean dictatorship (1976–1983). Despite an extensive body of knowledge devoted to study the last military intervention, most of the research focused on human rights violations that occurred in hidden concentration camps; little attention has been paid to the role of the press in supporting the armed forces in power. The most popular and top selling newspapers such as Clarin and La Nacion not only were favoured with generous business deals by the military regimes, but also developed a particular narrative praising the armed forces. Using medical metaphors, binary opposites such as order and disorder and particular front page layouts, newspapers supported the idea of military rule as providing the only alternative to re-establish order for the common good in a country deeply affected by political violence. This article also analyses the fraudulent purchase of paper factory Papel Prensa S.A. made between the military junta an...

Tekst stanowi omówienie akt sądowych sprawy jednego z funkcjonariuszy Stałej Ochrony Obozu Oświęcimskiego, który w 1946 r., podczas wykonywania swoich obowiązków służbowych zastrzelił osobę podejrzaną o profanację szczątków ofiar KL Auschwitz. Sprawa ta jest dotąd jedynym znanym i tak dobrze udokumentowanym przypadkiem zabójstwa tzw. kanadziarza przez pracownika ochrony Muzeum w Oświęcimiu. Dokumenty zostały wytworzone przez Sądy: Grodzki w Oświęcimiu, Okręgowy w Wadowicach i Apelacyjny w Krakowie, gdzie toczył się proces przeciwko wartownikowi. Materiały procesowe, pośród których znajdują się m.in.: protokoły przesłuchania świadków i oskarżonego, sentencje i interpretacje wyroków sądów dwóch instancji, apelacje przechowywane są dzisiaj w Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej w Krakowie. Dają nam one obraz sytuacji, jaka panowała na terenie byłego obozu Auschwitz w pierwszych latach po jego wyzwoleniu w kwestii zabezpieczenia terenów poobozowych. Ponadto są cennym źródłem do badania problemu bezczeszczenia szczątków ofiar byłych obozów koncentracyjnych i zagłady.

Drawing on the concept of the concentration camp, this examination of the history of the Syrets camp near Kiev traces the principle stages of Nazi terror, exploitation, and extermination in the occupied capital of the Ukraine. The author locates Syrets in the context of the evolving camp system of the Third Reich. The famous Soviet film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko, in Kiev for the first time after the Nazi occupation, wrote in his diary, "what struck me most of all, plunged me into unforgettable grief and despair, as well as anguish that I also will never forget, was the people. The people of Kiev. There were none. The city was empty. I saw only about one hundred in all, alone or in small groups. These were mainly old people and inva- lids, cripples." 1 Thus did Dovzhenko testify to the horrifying results of the Nazis' reign of terror in the capital of the Ukraine. But what were the instruments of this terror? What were its phases? How did these correspond to the general direction of Nazi policy in the occupied territories of the USSR as a whole? These questions have not received thorough consideration in the literature. Scholars have studied various aspects of the history of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine as a whole, German domina- tion in particular regions, or, regarding the district of Kiev, certain aspects of the op- pressive policy of the Nazi police and collaborationist formations. 2 Babi Yar has occupied a special place in the scholarship, but researchers have emphasized the shooting of the Jewish population of Kiev on September 28 and 29, 1941, while largely ignoring Nazi terror that lead up to this event and the genocidal mechanisms and measures that followed. 3 Here I analyze the history of the Syrets concentration camp as one of the chief instruments of Nazi terror in Kiev. The study focuses on events at Babi Yar too, though not so much on the shootings in late September 1941 as on events that preced- ed and followed them. Nazi terror evolved in Kiev, and the victims changed over time. Categorizing Syrets as a concentration camp requires explanation, particularly because European historiography usually reserves the term for those camps directly under the SS Concentration Camps Inspectorate of the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA). 4 But this approach derives from the bureaucratic definition

Although the South African War was a colonial war, it aroused great interest abroad as a test of international morality. Both the Boer republics were signatories to the Geneva Convention of 1864, as was Britain, but the resources of these small countries were limited, for their populations were small and, before the discovery of gold in 1884, government revenues were trifling. It was some time before they could put even the most rudimentary organization in place. In Europe, public support from pro-Boers enabled National Red Cross Societies from such countries as the Netherlands, France, Germany, Russia and Belgium to send ambulances and medical aid to the Boers. The British military spurned such aid, but the tide of public opinion and the hospitals that the aid provided laid the foundations for similar voluntary aid in the First World War. Until the fall of Pretoria in June 1900, the war had taken the conventional course of pitched battles and sieges. Although the capitals of both the Boer republics had fallen to the British by June 1900, the Boer leaders decided to continue the conflict. The Boer military system, based on locally recruited, compulsory commando service, was ideally suited to guerrilla warfare, and it was another two years before the Boers finally surrendered. During this period of conflict, about 30,000 farms were burnt and the country was reduced to a wasteland. Women and children, black and white, were installed in camps which were initially ill-conceived and badly managed, giving rise to high mortality, especially of the children. As the scandal of the camps became known, European humanitarian aid shifted to the provision of comforts for women and children. While the more formal aid organizations, initiated by men, preferred to raise funds for post-war reconstruction, charitable relief for the camps was often provided by informal women's organizations. These ranged from church groups to personal friends of the Boers, to women who wished to be associated with the work of their menfolk.

Following recent research on Nazi perpetrators and the death marches, this article further examines the broad involvement of the local German population in the camp evacuations by utilizing action-theoretical and praxeological implications. Primarily based on sources from US and German case files, the author widens the spectrum of protagonists in order to expose the involvement of many ‘ordinary Germans’ as active participants. Dealing not only with direct perpetrators, but also with groups of denouncers, logistical supporters, witnesses, as well as the few rescuers, he outlines the camp evacuations as a decentralized societal crime in Nazi Germany's rural areas: a scenario of broad participation in extremely violent events with neither centralized control nor necessarily shared orders or goals among its agents. The article also addresses the aftermath of the camp evacuations by asking how this role of the local German population was reflected in prosecution and public remembrance of the death marches.

Camps suggest an Enlightenment project derailed. Associated most often and perhaps most appropriately with Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Gulag under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, the barbed-wire aesthetic of the camp and the skeletal profile of overworked and undernourished inmates stand as stark reminders of the ideological excesses of an "age of extremes." They are emblems of modern terror. Yet camps are by no means unique to the despotic powers of a short 20th century. Indeed, Britain presided over a considerable empire of labor and detention camps in a long and ostensibly liberal 19th century. Camps segregated and immobilized populations deemed vagrant, criminal, or otherwise socially or politically dangerous. In contrast to prisons and other disciplinary sites, camps were instruments of collective detention that operated outside normal judicial procedures, often in the context of a perceived emergency. As an integral tool of multiple polities in the 19th and 20th centuries, they enforced heavy labor and penal rations under dire economic restraints, often in the name of controlling and rehabilitating "problem populations." In Britain, camps concentrated an undesirable "dangerous class" in the metropole. But it was the British Empire that offered an especially ripe environment for the development of camps. Directed at a racial and cultural "other" and detached, at times, from public scrutiny, the authoritarian nature of imperial rule motivated officials to assemble many of the physical and psychological prerequisites for the coercive encampment of suspect groups. Although labor, concentration, and extermination camps became infamous in the 20th century, Britain and other colonial powers in the 19th century assembled many of the cultural, material, and political preconditions of forced encampment. Given their global profile at the turn of the 19th century, British camps may have suggested a direct and conscious model for the early camps of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. But more than this, British rule helped foster the structural and conceptual preconditions for the development and management of camps. Imperial administration generated a sophisticated logistical and bureaucratic apparatus aimed at the organization and control of unfamiliar and potentially dangerous populations. Furthermore, it incubated a mental framework (shared across the Western world) that at times demanded the exclusion and incarceration of groups deemed socially or racially suspect. As instruments of the modern "gardening state," moreover, camps embodied an Enlightenment impulse to classify and rationalize large populations on a macro scale, rooting out potential "weeds" in the name of order, prosperity, and social purity. (1) The products of coercion and suspicion, British camps were also justified by discourses of social welfare, humanitarian uplift, and sanitary reform--the justifying imperatives of European rule--that were always preached but only imperfectly practiced. British camps were often the expedient products of emergencies: famine, disease, and war. Although contingent on circumstance, they help reveal the deeper structures of Western culture that gave rise to extrajudicial detention. As artifacts of social and political modernity assembled by the world's first "modern" state, British camps offer insight into an archaeology of violence shared by states across the ideological spectrum. By confining in a preemptive manner populations deemed "potentially dangerous" but not convicted of any crime, British camps conformed to a more general typology of concentration camps in the modern world. (2) Checked by liberal ideology and an open public sphere, Britain never assembled anything so brutal as the Soviet Gulag, let alone the Nazi extermination camp. On the contrary, relief and rehabilitation often proved the dominant stated motive. But British camps stemmed nonetheless from new mindsets and government rationalities that sought to organize potentially dangerous segments of the population on a mass scale. …