Ebook: Hitler's Prisons

Overview: Nikolaus Wachsmann describes the operation and function of legal terror in the Third Reich and brings Nazi prisons to life through the harrowing stories of individual inmates. Drawing on a vast array of archival materials, he traces the series of changes in prison policies and practice that led to racial abuse, brutal violence, slave labour, starvation and mass killings. Wachsmann demonstrates that ‘ordinary’ legal officials were ready collaborators who helped to turn courts and prisons into key components in the Nazi web of terror. He concludes with a discussion of the whitewash of the Nazi legal system in postwar West Germany.