Hitler's prisons : legal terror in Nazi Germany / Nikoulaus Wachsmann.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed October 04, 2016).

Cover page; Halftitle page; Title page; Copyright page; Contents; Figures; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Map; Introduction; Part I Setting the Scene; 1 The Weimar Prison, 1918-33; Crime and Correction; The Prison and the Public; Fighting the 'Incorrigible'; The Prison in Crisis; Part II Enforcing Legal Terror, 1933-39; 2 Inside the Nazi Prison; Terror, Crime and Punishment; Hitler's Jurists and the Prison; Everyday Life Behind Bars; Prison Camps; 3 The Campaign against 'Community Aliens'; Political Resistance and Repression; 'Dangerous Habitual Criminals' and Security Confinement.

Sex Crimes, Castration and HomosexualityThe Sterilisation of Prisoners; German Jews and Legal Terror; 4 The Nazi Web of Terror; The Rise of the Police and the SS; Conflict and Compromise: the Law and the Police; Denouncing Prisoners to the Police; Prisons and Concentration Camps; Part III Escalating Legal Terror, 1939-45; 5 Law in Wartime; Terror on the Home Front, 1939-41; The Legal System under Attack, 1942; Total War and Extermination, 1942-44; 6 Prison Conditions: from Bad to Worse; Prisons as Penal Factories; Life and Death in Prisons; Torment in Prison Camps; 7 Privilege and Punishment.

'National Comrades' behind BarsSoldiers as Prisoners -- Prisoners as Soldiers; Foreign Political Prisoners; Enforcing Racial Policy: Polish Prisoners; 8 Killing Prisoners; 'Annihilation through Labour': the View from Above; 'Annihilation through Labour': the View from Below; Extending the Killings: 'Asocials' and the Disabled; Capital Punishment; 9 Final Defeat; The Last Stand of Nazi Terror; Prison Evacuations; Chaos, Murder, Liberation; Part IV Aftermath; 10 The Nazi Prison in Perspective; Bloody Hands, Clean Conscience: Nazi Jurists and Postwar Justice.

Back to Work: Prison Officials in West GermanyEast Germany and the Perversion of the Law; Special Path? A Comparative View; Conclusion; Figures; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 488-522) and index.

State prisons played an indispensable part in the terror of the Third Reich, incarcerating many hundreds of thousands of men and women during the Nazi era. This important book illuminates the previously unknown world of Nazi prisons, their victims, and the judicial and penal officials who built and operated this system of brutal legal terror. 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 eventually to racial terror, brutal violence, slave labor, 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. And he concludes with a discussion of the whitewash of the Nazi legal system in postwar West Germany.

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