Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

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 post-war West Germany. "One of the most important books to be published on Nazi Germany in many years."-Richard J. Evans, University of Cambridge; "An outstanding piece of work-one of the best studies of the Third Reich to appear for a long time. No serious future work on the Nazi state will be able to by-pass this book."-Sir Ian Kershaw, author of 1889-1936 Hubris and 1936-1945 Nemesis

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II

560 pages, Hardcover

First published June 10, 2004

About the author

Nikolaus Daniel Wachsmann (born 1971 in Munich) is a professor of modern European history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.