"Jeopardies of Memory": Arab Inmates in National Socialist Concentration Camps

Abstract

The author raises the question why - in contrast to the intensive research on germanophile Arab politicians and their collaboration with the Axis powers - the Arab as well as the non-Arab historians took and take no notice of the Arab victims of National Socialism and Fascism. In the following article he presents preliminary results of his research on one group of these victims, the Arab inmates in Nazi concentration camps between 1939 and 1945. He points out that the number of the Arab inmates in these camps is comparable with the number of inmates from other small nations, that the conditions of detention and the sufferings of the inmates, though not deported and incarcerated excusively for racial reasons as happened with the Jews, were no less horrible respectively less significant as the conditions and sufferings of millions of other, non-Jewish people who were imprisoned in the camps by the Gestapo for ordinary political reasons. Arabs never have been among the privileged inmates, but the...