Professor Alan Kramer

Summary

This project is the first transnational comparative investigation of the history of concentration camps. The history of concentration camps in Nazi Germany is now well advanced, with several scholarly histories of the concentration camps from 1933 to 1945 published over the last three decades. The history of the concentration camps of Italian Fascism, long neglected by historians, has recently been discovered as an important theme. The story of the GULag, the camp system in the Soviet Union, has been revitalized by the opening of access to the archives. However, none of the overall histories or histories of individual camps adequately examines their origins and compares their changing function in history. This project therefore is designed to test various hypotheses on the origins of the camps by systematically scrutinizing the scholarly research on the Spanish policy of 'reconcentración' in Cuba in 1896 and the British concentration camps in South Africa to the construction of the Nazi concentration camps and the post-Second World War period, and by conducting original research on the camp system in the belligerent countries of the Great War, the international learning process, the treatment of civilian internees, the development of international law and the prosecution of violations of international humanitarian law in the camps. An examination of the decision-making process that established the extermination camps in 1941 and gave the term its contemporary meaning, is essential, even if the process of genocide is not the main focus of the project. Many historians justifiably see camps as the dark side of modern human civilization. For that reason it will be a central part of the project to explain the system of incarceration: security, exclusion, punishment, economic exploitation, and eradication. First results were published in edited collections in 2011 and 2013.