(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 10, 2009

MAHWAH – At a talk on March 10, 2009 sponsored by the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Ramapo College’s History Club, Dr. Joseph Robert White, a research assistant at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, discussed the early development of Nazi concentration camps. The Third Reich, he emphasized, did not invent the concentration camp. Rather, it subverted the legal mechanism of protective custody to rapidly turn a string of detention facilities into a system designed to suppress political and other forms of dissent.

Namely, as a measure allowed under German law, prior to 1933 selective political persecution through mass arrests was permitted. White explained how the Nazis transformed protective custody or, in German, Schutzhaft, into unlimited detention and more, including torture and state-sanctioned murder. White emphasized that from the outset, moreover, Jewish prisoners were exposed to especially harsh and brutal treatment.

White has contributed ninety articles to the forthcoming, seven-volume “United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.” Volume I of the encyclopedia, which concerns Nazi concentration camps, will be published by Indiana University Press later this year.

A specialist on the history of Nazi concentration camps, he also works with related projects, including the recently opened International Tracing Service and the donated photographic album of Auschwitz SS officers.

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