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This book surveys the history of concentration camps from their beginnings in colonial warfare to the present, but it questions facile assumptions about their origins.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Origins? Colonial Liberation Wars at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- 1: From Early Modern Europe to Colonial Warfare
- Part II. The First World War: Laboratory or Archive?
- 2: The Authoritarian Empires in the First World War
- 3: The Liberal Empires in the First World War
- 4: The Inter-War Period
- Part III. The Gulag
- 5: The Invention of the Gulag: From Repression to Empire-Building, 1918-1937
- 6: The Shifting Purposes of the Gulag from the Early 1930s to 1941
- 7: The Gulag from the Second World War to Its Post-War Demise
- Part IV. The Nazi Camp Universe
- 8: Nazi Germany, 1933-1939
- 9: The Nazi Concentration Camp System and the Turning Point, 1939
- 10: The Prisoner of War Experience
- 11: Nazi Concentration Camps in the Second World War
- 12: Auschwitz and the Death Camps
- 13: Comprehending the Nazi Camps
- Part V. Other Camps During and After the Second World War
- 14: Other Concentration Camps in the Second World War
- 15: Concentration Camps After the Second World War
- Part VI. The Contemporary World
- 16: Amnesia and Memory
- 17: Concluding Remarks
About the author
Alan Kramer has published widely on the history of war, including the prize-winning
German Atrocities 1914. A History of Denial (Yale UP, 2001, with co-author John Horne). His next book,
Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (OUP, 2007) applied a transnational perspective to war in Europe, 1912-23. As one of the founding editors of
1914-1918 Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, he has been at the forefront of the turn to global history, which inspired also his co-edited books,
Welt der Lager. Zur "Erfolgsgeschichte" einer Institution (Hamburger Edition, 2013), and
Fascist Warfare, 1922-1945 (Palgrave, 2019).
Summary
This book surveys the history of concentration camps from their beginnings in colonial warfare to the present, but it questions facile assumptions about their origins.
