scholarly journals Turn the pain and affliction into thinking about the beauty

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-560
Author(s):  
Bogusława Filipowicz
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Teaching Staff ◽  
Female Prisoners ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
The Third ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
Medical Experiments ◽  
War Memories ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract: The article reflects on the importance of opposing Polish women - prisoners of the German Nazi concentration camp FKL Ravensbrück - to the practices of the German authorities (guards and medical staff of this camp) used against prisoners. One of the forms of opposing the totalitarianism of the Third Reich was secret teaching. At FKL Ravensbrück, female teachers taught fellow prisoners - “the rabbits”. This term was used to describe the women who underwent medical experiments in the camp: 74 Polish women and 12 women of other nationalities. Professor Karolina Lanckorońska found herself in the camp's conspiratorial teaching staff. The source base for the analysis are the war memories of female prisoners, including Dr. Wanda Półtawska and Dr. Urszula Wińska. The summary shows the issue of the protection of values by people subjected - against their will - to life in extreme conditions.  

Suicide in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-9

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Goeschel
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
And Control ◽  
Good And Evil

Too often histories of the concentration camps tend to be ignorant of the wider political context of nazi repression and control. This article tries to overcome this problem. Combining legal, social and political history, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the changing relationship between the camps as places of extra-legal terror and the judiciary, between nazi terror and the law. It argues that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as existing accounts claim. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration camp authorities covered up the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. This article also looks at actual suicides in the pre-war camps, to highlight individual inmates’ reactions to life within the camps. The article concludes that the history of the concentration camps needs to be firmly integrated into the history of nazi terror and the Third Reich.

The Production of “Official Memory” in East Germany: Old Communists and the Dilemmas of Memoir-Writing

1999 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Third ◽  
Museum Exhibitions ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Ruling Party ◽  
Socialist Unity

In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led antifascist struggle. Intended to legitimate the SED regime, this official memory was rehearsed in countless “lieux de mémoire,” including films, novels, school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and commemorative rituals. Concurrently, party authorities encouraged Old Communists to share their past lives with younger East Germans; in particular, they urged Old Communists to write memoirs of their participation in the antifascist struggle against Hitler.

scholarly journals Share of death: Care crosses camp

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-648
Author(s):  
Georgios Tsagdis
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Total Power ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Death Care

The essay thematises the question of care in conditions of total power - not merely extra muros, in the everyday life of the Third Reich, but in its most radical articulation, the concentration camp. Drawing inspiration from Todorov?s work, the essay engages with Levinas, Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, to investigate Heidegger?s determination of Dasein?s horizon through a solitary confrontation with death. Drawing extensively on primary testimonies, the essay shows that when the enclosure of the camp became the Da of existence, care assumed a radical significance as the link between the death of another and the death of oneself. In the face of an apparatus of total power and its attempt to individuate and isolate death, the sharing of death in the figure of care remained one?s most inalienable act of resistance and the last means to hold on to death as something that could be truly one?s own.

The Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-459
Author(s):  
Andrew Chandler
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Secret Agent

Early in April 1945 a little collection of political prisoners, including a British secret agent, a Russian air force officer and a German general, were driven by their guards across the diminishing face of the Third Reich. Among them was the thirty-nine year old theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was curious company for a German pastor. Bonhoeffer had joined the group at Buchenwald concentration camp on 7 February. In April he and his new friends were moved to Regensburg, and from there to Schönberg. On 8 April 1945 Bonhoeffer was abruptly separated from the other prisoners. As he was about to leave, he turned to the British agent, Captain Payne Best, and said a few words. The next day he was hanged at Flossenburg with the former head of German Military Intelligence, Admiral Canaris, and Colonel Hans Oster. An SS doctor saw the execution, and was struck by the religious devotion, and the spiritual trust, of the victim.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
German People

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

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