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Network of Terror: The Nazi Concentration Camps

Reviewed by Christian Gerlach

  1. Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann, eds., Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwicklung und Struktur (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998).
  2. Karin Orth is at present wissenschaftliche Assistentin in the history department of the University of Freiburg, Germany.
  3. See the articles by Daniel Blatman, Eleonore Lappin, Zvi Erez, and Joachim Neander in Yad Vashem Studies 28 (2000), pp. 155-310.
  4. Cf. Orth, System, p. 21, and Martin Broszat, “The Concentration Camps 1933-1945,” in Hans Buchheim, et al., Anatomy of the SS State (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 397-497. For the sub-camps of 1944/45, see also vol. 15 (2000) of the Dachauer Hefte.
  5. The death camps in Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka are not covered by Orth’s studies. They were not considered concentration camps, which were defined as camps under the administration of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager).
  6. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler‘s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Jens Banach, Heydrichs Elite: Das Führungskorps der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1936-1945 (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 1998); vol. 16 of the Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus: Durchschnittstäter: Handeln und Motivation, Christian Gerlach and Ahlrich Meyer, eds (Berlin: Schwarze Risse, 2000).
  7. Kriegsjugendgeneration: the generation who experienced war during their youth.
  8. See also Gerlach and Meyer, Durchschnittstäter.
  9. Richard Baer, Friedrich Hartjenstein, Johannes Hassebroek, Rudolf Höss, Paul Werner Hoppe, Josef Kramer, Arthur Liebehenschel, Max Pauly, Hermann Pister, Fritz Suhren, and Martin Weiss.
  10. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
  11. They were “weder intellektuell in der Lage, noch sahen sie überhaupt die Notwendigkeit, über ihre Beweggründe zu reflektieren“ (Konzentrationslager-SS, p. 299). Despite some similarities, Orth’s argument goes considerably beyond the conclusions of Tom Segev, Die Soldaten des Bösen: Zur Geschichte der SS-Kommandanten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992), pp. 261-265 (English edition: Soldiers of Evil [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987]).
  12. Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz, Martin Broszat, ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963). This question seems especially justified because Höss was a section head of the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps in 1943/44.