The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.

This chapter examines the debate over the applicability of the term ‘concentration camp’ for the migrant detention centers at the southern border of the United States in the context of the Trump administration and its authoritarian turn. In June 2019, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, when she declared the detention centers “concentration camps,” provoked a turn in Holocaust memory culture, as she asked Americans to look prior to the Holocaust to the long Western history of the concentration and detention of unwanted populations. Ocasio-Cortez’s public analogical reasoning produced heated reactions which fell primarily along party lines, with the Republican Party embracing Holocaust exceptionalism and the Democratic Party open to analogies as potential motivators of political action. The debate also opened another chapter in the scholarly discussion of the efficacy of analogical reasoning, with the conditions at the border and the Trump era’s abuses suggesting an urgency for some. For those interested in direct action, Ocasio-Cortez’s evocation of the memory of the Holocaust required immediate intervention in the name of Holocaust vigilance.

This chapter provides an overview of the Gestapo and political policing in Government District Düsseldorf. The origins of ministerial independence are traced through laws, precedents, and power struggles that recast political police as a “special authority” removed from administrative oversight. The origins of preventative police justice outline how Himmler carved out a new mandate of prevention without encroaching on punishment through the courts under the cover of policy and law regulating arbitrary “protective custody” in concentration camps. An overview of politico-economic geography then underlines the importance attributed to suppressing dissent in this strategically vital district with historically low support for Nazism. Generational biography of regional personnel further details how this conditioned a shared institutional culture defined by the defeat of 1918 and communist uprisings in the Rhineland. Finally, tectonic shifts in case load identify inflection points in 1935 as the Gestapo pursued organized resistance into society at large, and in 1943 when case load plummeted as attention shifted to suppressing a slave revolt.

The policing of opinion transitioned from camps to courts during the first years of the Third Reich. The criminalization of criticism traced to the Reichstag Fire. Emergency decrees permitted arbitrary detention for suppressing a communist uprising and criminalized “disinformation.” Loose regulation quickly expanded enforcement from Marxist organizations and publicly supporting revolution to include private expressions of dissent by “chronic complainers and grumblers.” Mounting skepticism about this protracted state of emergency led to accusations of lawlessness from Hitler’s conservative partners by 1934. Policymakers responded by reining in protective custody and rewriting treason statutes to prosecute communist sedition through the courts. The disinformation decree was also rewritten to cover criticizing the regime. Stricter regulation brought the focus back to organized communist resistance, but the rewritten laws left the door open to policing private opinion in society at large. By 1935, the policing of criticism had settled into routine practices and formal processes under a newly expanded Law against Malicious Gossip governing the private conversations of Germans.

The political and economic struggle for control over South Africa between the British and the Boers erupted a second time in October 1899. A Boer offensive resulted in the sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, threatening loyal British settlers and economic interests. Against his better judgment, General Buller divided his forces to satisfy immediate political and public interests. The result was the disastrous 'Black Week' of mid-December 1899, when all three British armies were stopped in their tracks at the Battles of Magersfontein, Stormberg, and Colenso. Supplies were readied, volunteers were recruited, and more divisions were mobilized. Over the next year, thanks to an overwhelming numerical advantage, the British regrouped and their advance succeeded in relieving the besieged towns and capturing and the Boer capitals. The Boer commandos in the field, however, refused to surrender and abandoning set-piece battles, they turned to guerrilla tactics. Lord Kitchener’s employment of a blockhouse system, a network of concentration camps, and scorched earth policy eventually broke Boer morale and their ability to continue the struggle. The South African War was Britain’s largest and most costly small war. Nearly half of a million British and Imperial troops fought; 22,000 never came home.

Technical innovation in agriculture preceded that in mining, and the value of colonial agricultural production exceeded that of diamonds throughout the nineteenth century. After the Cape received responsible government in 1874 a colonial scientific bureaucracy was gradually expanded to include a veterinary surgeon, a Department of Agriculture, and a state botanist, geologist, entomologist and marine biologist. The discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and Witwatersrand gold in the 1880s reshaped the contours of race and science. Mining became reliant on increasingly sophisticated technology and on cheap black labour. Rapid growth in the mining sector has been analysed by historians in terms of the relationship between capital and labour. Scientific and technological innovations were also critical: applied geology, water pumps, explosives, stamping gear and the recently discovered cyanide process for gold extraction. The geostrategic importance of southern Africa became a point of growing competition, and the borders of a unitary South African state in 1910 emerged out of wars of conquest against African societies and intense conflict between English- and Dutch-speaking citizens. Imperial conquest and expansion were in turn associated with rapid technological change: steamships, railways, transatlantic cables and breech loading rifles. Together these constituted a ‘full-blown socio-technical imaginary’.

This chapter concentrates on the early months of the war, and delving into autobiographical testimonies looks more closely at the suffering and fate of enemy aliens. The chapter then describes the implementation of the policies adopted in the early months and deals with expulsion, forced repatriation and deportation. It then addresses the internment of civilians, which was one of the major novelties that the belligerent countries introduced in the European war. The chapter follows the spread of concentration camps throughout Europe and the British and French Empires, the internment gender and generational dimensions, and the beginning of the humanitarian activities that the mass internment of enemy aliens triggered. The third part of the chapter deals with another crucial novelty that concerned the property rights of the enemy aliens. States at war sequestered and confiscated their assets as part and parcel of the economic war they waged. The internment and sequestration of enemy property led to enormous growth in the apparatuses of the state. And this meant that state involvement in the lives of civilians increased disproportionately.

This chapter follows the globalization and radicalization of the policies on enemy aliens that occurred in the last two years of the war. In 1917, the conflict became truly global with the entrance of the Americas (the United States, Brazil and Cuba) and Asia (the independent states of China and Siam, and the Philippines as a US dependency). At the same time, Russia and Romania exited the conflict, signing disadvantageous peace agreements with Germany. All the states that joined the war in 1917 drew up policies against enemy aliens, notwithstanding the enormous differences in the numbers of such people within their territories. The chapter analyzes the policies against enemy aliens in the United States, in Brazil, in China and Siam, and compares them with the evolution of the war in Europe where radicalization transformed all foreigners into enemies and also affected neutral countries. The chapter concentrates in particular on a series of new developments that concerned property rights. On the eve of the end of the conflict, property rights were no longer safe in any of the belligerent countries and were actually in pieces in many places.

This chapter will present both a history of the concentration camp and a consideration of why this institution is so important to modern consciousness and identity. Briefly tracing the concentration camp’s origins in the colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it then stresses the significance of World War I, which saw the internment of civilians and POWs on a large scale. It then examines the Nazi camp system and the Stalinist “Gulag” and compares the totalitarian countries’ use of camps with those of other, neglected settings, such as the American internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, Franco’s camps during and after the Spanish Civil War, Britain’s use of camps for Jewish DPs in Cyprus trying to reach Palestine after World War II, and the colonial powers’ resort to camps during the wars of decolonization, such as in Kenya. By offering a survey of the history of concentration camps in a global setting, the chapter is then able to engage with the philosophical literature dealing with the question of what the camps tell us about the nature of the modern world.

Chapter 4 examines the sites and functions of the camps and the treatment and conditions to which internees were subjected. It shows that there were more camps than often believed, especially in the west, and that although most had a Nazi past only a minority were former concentration camps. It shows that the camps served multiple functions (including holding SMT convicts) and operated under changing authority, especially in the US zone with a shift to German administration in 1946 and the Soviet zone with subordination to the Gulag in 1948. The chapter shows that after initial similarities in internees’ isolation, poor conditions, and rough treatment, crucial differences emerged between the western and the Soviet zones. Soviet internees remained isolated from the outside world, had limited opportunities for work or other meaningful activity, and remained inadequately accommodated, clothed, and most importantly fed. As a result, over 40,000 died from starvation and related diseases and were buried in mass graves. Soviet authorities’ failure to stop the mass dying stands in contrast to the western powers’ effective responses to early malnutrition. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that the western camps were not always the transparent, peaceful sites of re-education they are sometimes taken for.

The conclusion reprises the book’s main arguments: about the need to understand internment at once as an important Allied measure in its own right, but also as one that intersected in complex ways with other measures such as prosecution, denazification, and demilitarization; about the severity and coerciveness of the Allied purge, but also its differentiation; and about the underlying commonality of western and Soviet internment as an extrajudicial attempt to remove core Nazi personnel. The conclusion also considers internees’ reactions and internment’s impact, highlighting its role in clearing the way for new political institutions and new political elites, and thus in the democratization of western and the Stalinization of eastern Germany. The conclusion then addresses the question of how the camps should be characterized, in particular critiquing arguments made by some scholars for labelling the Soviet camps ‘concentration camps’. In order to capture their underlying similarity with, as well as important, lethal differences, from the western camps, the conclusion suggests the Soviet camps in general be understood as Stalinist internment camps, while those that held internees and SMT convicts be termed Stalinist internment and prison camps.