Abstract
Reviewed by: Marc Buggeln, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
Dan Stone, a professor at Royal Holloway College in London primarily known for his works on the history of the Holocaust and post-war Europe, has successfully mastered the challenge of writing about the thorny issue of the ‘concentration camp’ in a short and comprehensive way. His introduction to the topic reflects the very latest research. Key questions are dealt with skilfully and answered at times rather pointedly, and at times with due consideration to a number of different points of view.
The book is subdivided into six chapters. The first chapter offers a brief introduction that focuses primarily on the early attempts, after the Second World War, by Patrick Gordon Walker and Hannah Arendt to gain an understanding of the Nazi concentration camps. This chapter also includes a working definition of a concentration camp as ‘an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians’ (4). This definition is the book’s greatest weakness because it completely fails to differentiate a concentration camp from a prison. In fact, far more convincing attempts at narrowing down the scope of the term exist in the literature. However, since the author makes no subsequent references to this definition, this shortcoming is of no consequence for the remainder of the work.
The second chapter deals with the origins of the concentration camp. Here Stone subscribes to the general opinion that the first camps date back to the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century. The four cases listed here are the Spanish in Cuba, the Americans in the Philippines, the British in South Africa, and the Germans in Namibia. Stone goes beyond previous research in emphasizing that long before the nineteenth century, colonists, primarily in the US and Australia, forcibly moved indigenous peoples to reservations, where they lived under squalid conditions with high mortality rates. In addition to the camps of the colonial era, the book deals with the POW and civilian camps of the First World War, which in many respects served as a model for subsequent Nazi and Soviet camps, even though the author rightly emphasizes that such precursors provide little help in coming to terms with these more recent systems of internment (42).
Taking into consideration the mountains of literature available on the Nazi camps, it is especially challenging to write a summary of this topic in only twenty pages. Stone organizes his narrative of the Nazi concentration camps according to various phases, and uses this as an opportunity to emphasize that our view of the early camps has occasionally been obscured by the Holocaust and the situation at the liberation of the camps. The end of Chapter 3 deals with the camps that the National Socialists established to forge Germany’s youth and to groom a number of hand-picked groups to become elite Nazis. This is an immensely important aspect to our understanding of German society, but it has little to do with the book because, even according to Stone’s very general definition, these institutions do not qualify as concentration camps.
The fourth chapter on gulags cleverly points out that, even today, this form of camp remains far more difficult to imagine than a Nazi concentration camp because Soviet internment facilities were not liberated and there were no photographs of masses of starving or dead prisoners. Today, most of the surviving images are of empty camps. Due to this dearth of photographic material, it is above all the memories of former prisoners that have shaped today’s image of the gulag.
Chapter 5 deals with a number of other internment systems dating from the Second World War as well as the post-war camps. First, it studies the camps under the yoke of fascism in south-eastern Europe. Then it examines the camps that Stone lists under the title ‘Liberal Internment’. These were mainly camps to intern enemy civilians in the US, displaced persons (DP) camps, particularly for Jewish Holocaust survivors after the end of the war, and camps and settlements under the colonial powers during the phase of decolonization. Stone clearly aims to show here that it was not only totalitarian states that established camps, and he points out that even after 1945 liberal-democratic states had internment facilities that resembled concentration camps in many ways. This is legitimate and, at least for the colonial camps, also accurate, but a more precise definition might have helped make it possible to pinpoint similarities and differences with a greater degree of accuracy. Although roughly twenty pages are dedicated to fascist and liberal camps, the camps of communist China and Cambodia were given a bit of a short shrift with only six pages. Given the sheer size of the system in China and the genocide in Cambodia, a number of sound arguments could be presented in favour of a more balanced emphasis.
In the final chapter, the author examines the sweeping notions of the camp as the ‘nomos of modernity’ (Agamben) and the ‘century of the camps’ (Bauman), and he highlights in a refreshingly calm manner the benefits and drawbacks of these catchphrases. Aside from a few minor details that merit criticism, Dan Stone has succeeded in providing an outstanding overview of the world of the concentration camp that, with fewer than two hundred pages, remains virtually unrivalled as a quick introduction to the topic for students.