Concentration Camps

A Short History

Bibliographic Data

ID3243227
AuthorsAidan Forth (Loyola University Chicago, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume48
Issue4
Pages552-554
Publication date2018-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169
PublisherMIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1162/jinh_r_01208
OpenAlexW2789983571
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited2

Concentration Camps: A Short History is a concise yet thought-provoking introduction to a sadly ubiquitous icon of the modern age. Along with Nazi Konzentrationslager and the Soviet Gulag, the book examines colonial concentration camps in nineteenth-century Africa and post–World War II enclosures in communist, fascist, and liberal-democratic venues. A concluding chapter pulls together the twentieth century’s many camps under the umbrella of a working definition while also considering the limits of any universal theory. Students and instructors alike will appreciate Stone’s accessible overview of major political theorists. Camps, Stone summarizes, concentrate “superfluous” populations (Arendt) during legal “states of exception” (Agamben) in the name of creating a new society and a new man (Bauman).1 These definitions do not apply to all “concentration camps” under discussion, however, because the stated theorists tend to enshrine the exceptional case of Nazi Germany as a normative and even exemplary model—a point that Stone acknowledges but might have driven home more forcefully.Stone’s ability to distill multiple specialist literatures while retaining empirical nuance is a major strength. As an expert in Nazi history, his versatility makes for an impressive overview of concentration camps from detention centers under Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco to internment camps in Kenya and Algeria. Where this book falls short, however, is in connecting historical dots. Stone skillfully slots a diverse array of camps into categories first suggested by Arendt—“Hades, Purgatory, Hell” (9). Each chapter, however, reads like a hermetically sealed unit. A case in point is the discussion of Nazi camps, which follows but is disconnected from the opening chapter about colonial Africa. Though absent from the bibliography, Enzo Traverso’s compelling book The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York, 2003) would have helped to indicate ways in which European imperialism incubated ideas and institutions later assimilated by the Nazis, including racism, lebensraum, exterminatory war, and most relevantly, concentration camps. Given recent interest in colonies as “laboratories” of modern violence, as well as Arendt’s own emphasis on the connections between imperialism and totalitarianism, this is a surprising omission. “Colonial” attitudes articulated by leading Nazis deserve further consideration, as does the prominence of colonial camps in Nazi propaganda. In 1941, for example, Joseph Goebbels commissioned the prize-winning film Ohm Krüger, set at a British concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War. Adolf Hitler liked to remind the world that concentration camps were a British import, which Germans merely read about “in the encyclopedia and then later copied.”2 Even if colonial camps, whether British, German, or otherwise, were different from, and offered little practical guidance for, those administered by Heinrich Himmler, such statements helped to familiarize Germans with concentration camps as a concept, and they warrant scrutiny in this book.Nazi and Soviet camps are usually understood within their own historiographical silos. At times, Stone could have done more to integrate them into a larger transnational story. Apart from considering colonial-totalitarian links, Stone might have compared the Gulag with tsarist and other systems of penal exile (like the transportation of convicts to Australia and the Andaman Islands), thereby integrating the Soviet case within a larger global continuum. Modern Russian prisons (which occupy repurposed Gulag camps) and America’s prison-industrial complex (which rivals Joseph Stalin’s Gulag in terms of sheer numbers) might also offer fruitful material for comparison and contrast. Meanwhile, more attention to Buber-Neuman’s famous autobiography (cited in passing), detailing her imprisonment in both Soviet and Nazi camps, would have helped to connect Stone’s chapters via the lived experience of inmates; so would Hopford’s Twice Interned (more obscure and understandably not cited) about detention during both the Boer War and World War I.3Concentration camps, Stone writes, “developed over time as different states and regimes have learned from others” (108). Though promising, this argument remains unfulfilled. Stone is to be commended for comparing a wide array of camps and for asking provocative questions: Are modern refugee camps just concentration camps in disguise? Is the “global south” one giant concentration camp? Stone’s thoughtful and well-written volume will no doubt spark important debate. But while Concentration Camps introduces theoretical frameworks that draw broad structural connections between different camp regimes, greater attention to international transfers of knowledge and practice would help to stitch Stone’s chapters into a coherent and evolving narrative

Colonialism · Communism · Gulag · Nazi concentration camps · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · North African History and Literature

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