The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp

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The Holocaust as Paradigm? A Nation under Arms, —; Citizens and Soldiers.

Sofsky takes us from the searing, unforgettable image of the Muselmann--Auschwitz jargon for the "walking dead"--to chronicles of epidemics, terror punishments, selections, and torture. The society of the camp was dominated by the S. Sofsky shows that the S. Consequently, although they were not required to torment or murder prisoners, officers and guards often exploited their freedom to do so--in passing or on a whim, with cause, or without. The order of terror described by Sofsky culminated in the organized murder of millions of European Jews and Gypsies in the death-factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty became possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred. Sofsky, a German sociologist and professor, examines the structure and history of the Nazi concentration camps from to , with much of his study devoted to the SS personnel that ran the camps.

Based on historical documents and survivors' testimony, this account was first published in Germany in , and subsequently published in France and Italy. Sofsky analyzes the camps as a distinctive system of absolute power, based on terror, organization, and excessive violence. The Nazi concentration camps illustrate the Dostoevskian doctrine that where there is no God, everything is permitted.

While the camps had many rules, there were no laws, and certainly no justice. In this lucidly translated volume, award-winning German sociologist Sofsky sets out to analyze the organization of dominance in the camps and concludes that they were places of "absolute power; not a means to an end, but an end in itself.

Whether beaten, worked to death or left to die of disease, their lives were worthless, and their pain meaningful only in the pleasure it provided to the torturers.

They were nothing, so nothing done to them mattered. Sofsky emphasizes that the murderers, ordinary people who were suffused with a spirit of "camaraderie" and a faith that they wouldn't be punished, did more than was required. Illustrations not seen by PW.

This work, a prize winner when published in Germany in , is derived from the author's postdoctoral thesis. In it Sofsky sociology, Univ. He does not attempt to explain how or why the Holocaust happened and for the most part focuses on the concentration camps rather than the extermination centers.

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Rather, Sofsky patiently shows how virtually everything in the camps, from their physical layout to the use of time to the categorization of prisoners, was a way of exercising and consolidating absolute power over an increasingly dehumanized prisoner population. An important study; recommended for academic and large public libraries. Simultaneously a sociological analysis of the concentration camp and a theoretical discourse on the nature of absolute power, this study provides a "thick description" of the Nazi concentration camp system.

He argues that the concentration camp was a closed site of absolute power where prisoners were subject to surveillance, classification, discipline, conditioning, and death, accompanied by the ever-present threat of arbitrary and deadly violence. The SS achieved absolute power through the complicity of "aristocratic" prisoner-functionaries who used their privileged positions to exploit--and often kill--their fellow inmates.

However, Sofsky never forgets that the SS exercised complete control over the camps and bore ultimate responsibility for the degradation and killing of human beings.