Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps. By Kim Wünschmann (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2015) 367 pp. $45.00

Abstract

In the history of the Holocaust, the words Jews and camps are virtually coterminous. The wartime camps—from “pure” extermination facilities like Belzec to the complex Auschwitz–Birkenau–Monowitz system—allocated Jews from Germany and across Europe to either instant death or its ever-present threat. Historians have told this story repeatedly since 1945, even if new facets are always being identified. But the premise of Wünschmann’s impressive and deeply researched study is that the unfamiliar history of Jewish Germans in the very different circumstances of Germany’s concentration-camp system before the war has received far too little attention. Skeptics will attribute this lack of interest to the fact that the political logic of the concentration camps bypassed the incarceration of Jews, who were supposed to be driven into emigration, not detained for the purposes of “re-education.” As a result, the number of Jews in the camps was tiny—about 5 percent of the camps’ population, according to Wünschmann’s evaluation of fragmentary statistical evidence. Moreover, until 1938, most of these people were held not simply because they were Jewish (a category of inmate that did not exist until 1938) but because of some other political or social identity that they shared with other detainees.While accepting some of this picture, Wünschmann makes a strong and sustained case for her primary claim—that the status of Jewish men and women in the camps demands to be investigated because of the role it played in the regime’s pre-war policies of categorizing, segregating, and stigmatizing Jews. Identifying Jews was not only the work of the discriminatory legal and administrative enactments adopted after 1933; it also took place in the lawless zone of the concentration camp—a zone legitimated, nonetheless, by the quasi-legal instrument of “protective custody.” The exceptionally brutal treatment that Jewish men received in the camps was intended to intimidate other Jews, not least as part of a sustained campaign to harass them into emigration and to extort their property. But for the wider “Aryan” public (including Jews’ fellow inmates), the causes for which Jews were detained and the treatment inflicted on them deliberately identified them with political extremism and subversion, with criminality, vice, and parasitism. The segregation and mistreatment of individuals also acclimatized Germans to subsequent arrests and deportations on a massive scale, encouraging SS guards to cultivate their power over a racially defined enemy shorn of all rights.Pursuing avenues of social theory opened by Lüdtke and Wildt, Wünschmann argues that the incarceration and violent mistreatment of Jews were embedded in social practices that aimed to legitimate and reinforce the public projection of Jews as an alien and hostile presence in Germany, whose elimination would help to consolidate the national community or Volksgemeinschaft.1 She demonstrates how the apparently isolated universe of the concentration camp thus served a process of stigmatic categorization that bled across the frontier of the camp fence—not least because the vast majority of Jews detained before 1939 were released. Although some of them were able to emigrate, others were destined for the worse fate of the wartime camps.Wünschmann gives as much weight to victims’ experiences as to the actions of policymakers and their executives. Her strategy thus answers Friedländer’s call for an “integrated history” of Jewish persecution in two senses—by embedding the concentration camps in German society under National Socialism rather than seeing them as essentially isolated, and by stressing the interdependent behaviors of Jews, other inmate groups, and guards.2 Concomitantly, Wünschmann successfully resists the teleological pull of the Holocaust, which makes everything before it appear as no more than a prelude to the final catastrophe. This approach gives her study what she calls a “natural cut-off point” at the outbreak of war in 1939, when the function of the camps in enforcing the distinction of German Jews from “Aryan” Germans lost its purchase as the population of non-Germans exploded and the camps’ purposes changed. With its discriminating integration of racial, gender, and political dimensions, this book is a valuable exemplar of the new, counter-teleological history of the pre-war concentration camps.