During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, "terror labor," and the business-like extermination of human beings.
Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down. Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space, perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable atrocities. As a result, daily life was reduced to a permanent struggle for survival, even as the meaning of self-preservation was extinguished. Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the "walking dead"--to chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and torture.
The society of the camp was dominated by the S.S. and a system of graduated and forced collaboration which turned selected victims into accomplices of terror. Sofsky shows that the S.S. was not a rigid bureaucracy, but a system with ample room for autonomy. The S.S. demanded individual initiative of its members. Consequently, although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners, officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in passing or on a whim, with cause, or without.
The order of terror described by Sofsky culminated in the organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty became possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.
Wolfgang Sofsky is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Göttingen. The Order of Terror was awarded the prestigious 1993 Geschwister-Scholl Prize. The book has also been published in France and Italy. Sofsky is the author of four other books in German about power, organization, and the anthropology of violence. William Templer is a widely published translator of German and Hebrew and teaches on the staff of Preslavsky University, Shumen, Bulgaria.
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments Pt. I Introduction 1 1 Entry 3 2 Absolute Power 16 3 On the History of the Concentration Camps 28 Pt. II Space and Time 45 4 Zones and Camp Plans 47 5 Boundary and Gate 55 6 The Block 65 7 Camp Time 73 8 Prisoner's Time 82 Pt. III Social Structures 95 9 The SS Personnel 97 10 Classes and Classifications 117 11 Self-Management and the Gradation of Power 130 12 The Aristocracy 145 13 Mass, Exchange, Dissociation 153 Pt. IV Work 165 14 Work and Slavery 167 15 The Beneficiaries 173 16 Work Situations 185 Pt. V Violence and Death 197 17 The Muselmann 199 18 Epidemics 206 19 Terror Punishment 214 20 Violent Excesses 223 21 Selection 241 22 The Death Factory 259 Epilogue 276 Selected Glossary and Abbreviations 283 Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography 289 Notes 291 Bibliography 343
"Wolfgang Sofsky dares the near impossible: he gives us a rational description of the concentration camp without losing sight of the human suffering, which the use of terror brought with it. . . . Sofsky exposes the potential of immorality that modern times carries within itself, and how the ordinary can transform itself into terror."—Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Dahrendorf
Wolfgang Sofsky dares the near impossible: he gives us a rational description of the concentration camp without losing sight of the human suffering, which the use of terror brought with it. . . . Sofsky exposes the potential of immorality that modern times carries within itself, and how the ordinary can transform itself into terror.
