Reading Trauma: The Shattering of the Self in the Concentration Camps—Objectification, “Like Dead,” and Regression

The term “concentration camp” has become a generic definition for the Nazi regime; the destruction of the Jews that began in such camps in Poland and the USSR are directly associated with these industries of death. The web of camps, which expanded significantly during the war, included 22 main camps and more than 1,200 sub-camps (Herbert, Orth, & Dieckmann, 1998). The camps served the SS as a way of carrying out the National Socialist regime and ideology. Neither politically nor economically driven, they were primarily instruments of ideology. The development they underwent during the war were a function of the new tasks imposed upon them, which shifted from what was at first “an ‘iron fist’ to circumvent the law as dictated by the regime's changing needs […] instruments of terror and ‘reeducation’ to frighten, deter, and paralyze the Nazis’ opposition.” This then became “dumping grounds for ‘work shirkers,’ ‘a-social elements,’ criminals, and Jews,” until the final result arrived of Vernichtung durch Arbeit—destruction through work—and the eradication of “groups of undesirables” (Gutman, 1998, p. 8).

A world within a world, they were a world unto themselves. As Wolfgang Sofsky states:

Within society, the concentration camp was a closed universe […] Its boundaries could not be crossed; its inmates were isolated and locked into a world of terror

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in which the camp personnel enjoyed a free hand […] For inmates, there was only one direction. After the initial phase in which the camp system was consolidated, no one, aside from a few escapees and released prisoners, ever came out again. For them, the camp was a colony of terror at the far extremity of the social world. (1997, p. 14)

Populated by people reduced to non-human beings, whose every moment—regulated by the camp order—was lived in the shadow of death, the camps turned the extreme into the norm, sustained and maintained by brutal