Soon after Hitler came to pow­er in 1933, his regime orga­nized the first con­cen­tra­tion camps in Ger­many. Those orig­i­nal­ly sent to camps like Dachau were the polit­i­cal ene­mies of the Nazi regime, but tar­get­ed groups soon includ­ed ​“social out­siders” such as Jews, Gyp­sies, crim­i­nals, and so on. After Kristall­nacht, the focus of the camps became racial, tar­get­ing non-Aryans, includ­ing thou­sands of Jews. By 1939, there were more than one hun­dred camps hold­ing a mil­lion pris­on­ers.

This book brings togeth­er pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments drawn from archives and libraries in Aus­tria, Ger­many, Great Britain, Switzer­land, and the Unit­ed States, which deal with the Nazi pre­war con­cen­tra­tion camps. A wel­come com­ple­ment to The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Camps and Ghet­tos, 1933 – 1945 project pub­lished by the Unit­ed States Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um, this book inves­ti­gates every­day life in the camps from the per­spec­tive of the Nazi bureau­cra­cy, which ran the camps; Nazi legal files; tri­al records of for­mer camp offi­cials; Nazi and for­eign news­pa­per arti­cles, includ­ing The New York Times; secret police reports; pub­lished and unpub­lished accounts by for­mer pris­on­ers, and many oth­er sources. Each of the six the­mat­ic chap­ters is intro­duced by a brief intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject mat­ter of the doc­u­ments. Chap­ter 3, for exam­ple, con­cerns the Con­cen­tra­tion Camp SS, where we are intro­duced to the bru­tal Theodore Eicke, the com­man­dant of Dachau, who was also respon­si­ble for the ​“rules and reg­u­la­tions” of the pre­war Nazi con­cen­tra­tion cam sys­tem. In this chap­ter, the edi­tors also explore through doc­u­ments the rank-in-file SS guards, who have long been neglect­ed by his­to­ri­ans of the camps.

As the edi­tors of this doc­u­men­tary his­to­ry of the pre-war camps inform us, ​”almost all pris­on­ers sur­vived the pre­war camps, and mass mur­der and mass deten­tion did not gen­er­al­ly occur until the war.” Unlike many doc­u­men­tary his­to­ries, the col­lec­tion under review (many of the doc­u­ments have been trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time) makes for com­pelling read­ing as well as shed­ding light on the com­plex rela­tion­ship between ter­ror, state, and soci­ety in the Third Reich.