Before Auschwitz

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust ResearchAuschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich.Investigating more than a dozen camps, from the infamous Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, Kim Wünschmann uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The concentration 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 labor assignments in the camps. Some of them were murdered. Over time, shocking accounts of camp life filtered into the German population, sending a message that Jews were different from true Germans: they were portrayed as dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Before Auschwitz explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.

[An] excellent monograph., Based on a vast body of archival materials, including SS reports, newspaper articles, prisoner letters and post-war memoirs, Before Auschwitz is a remarkable, humane, thought-provoking book., [Wünschmann’s] prize-winning study offers an original, thorough analysis of the Jewish prisoners in prewar camps, which remain a difficult topic because of their relative obscurity, overshadowed by the camps that served mass murder in the 1940s. In comparison, the early camps were small, holding only hundreds of prisoners. The prewar camps have been the topic of an array of recent, often regional scholarship, which tends to be descriptive and hard to digest. To her credit, Wünschmann synthesizes an impressive array of this scholarship and demonstrates formidable archival mastery… Wünschmann’s careful research and eye for detail offers a wealth of original contributions to existing fields of research, including suicide, homosexuality, prisoner functionaries, constructions of criminality, and the function of concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The book will be a welcome addition to the reading list for those teaching modern Jewish or Holocaust history., Kim Wünschmann has made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of German history and Jewish history in the interwar period through her meticulously detailed and penetrating study of Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps before the outbreak of the Second World War… This book should be of particular interest to criminologists, as the phenomena described and analyzed here reveal the degree to which discourses, laws and institutions were modified and created not as a response to lawbreaking in any conventional sense—but as a way to promote discrimination and racism, and especially as a means to persecute citizens deemed enemies of the state, in this case, Jews… A supremely well-argued and important study., Before Auschwitz is the first comprehensive monograph on the prewar fate of the roughly 40,000 Jewish men and women incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. Clearly structured, well written, and solidly grounded in both primary sources and an extensive secondary literature, Kim Wünschmann’s study provides crucial insights into the ways in which the evolution of concentration camps intersected with the regime’s prewar Judenpolitik and what that meant for Jewish prisoners…This study marks a major advance in the existing Holocaust literature.

Kim Wünschmann is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.