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Although twenty years have passed since the end of the Third Reich, interest focused on the victims of German concentration camps has been increasing rather than decreasing. The reasons for this development are not only the dramatic trials of war criminals and the growing number of scientific and fictional publications concerned with the conditions inside the camps, but equally so the emotional and physical condition of the former camp inmates. It has been a surprising and alarming fact that many victims of concentration camps suffer more from the after-effects at the present time than they did five, ten or fifteen years ago. Our endeavor to understand the psychodynamics of concentration camp victims seems, therefore, particularly urgent and warranted.
E. A. Cohen, (6) an inmate of concentration camps himself, examines the psychology of the inmates during their incarceration from a psychoanalytical point of view. He describes states of depersonalization, stupor and fright as initial reactions followed by mourning, guilt feelings and apathy in the stage of adaptation. He emphasizes the importance of the life instinct for survival and points out that the enforced regression results in partial identification of the victims with the SS as punitive parental images. In the final stage of resignation, the camp inmate directed his hatred against himself (see also Bettelheim [3]) and experienced the primal father as the group ideal.
The fact that the victims still show many of the foregoing features provides the basis of our present understanding.
Since the greater number of victims remained depressed, and since being uprooted from their closely-knit families served to deepen their depression (32) let us first discuss the psychodynamics in the case of chronic reactive depression.
We find that the degree of loss of self-esteem is proportionate to the degree of chronic reactive depression. (20) The depth of depression depends on the extent of the narcissistic regression and of the