:Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany

Abstract

In this carefully researched and path-breaking book, Nikolaus Wachsmann does not focus solely, as the title implies, on the largely unknown Nazi prisons, penitentiaries, and prison camps. He examines the Nazi judiciary as well and argues persuasively that, contrary to the long-held view of many scholars, the judiciary and penal system in Adolf Hitler's Germany played a key role in Nazi terror, along with the police and SS. During most of the Third Reich, German penal institutions, run by the traditional legal system, held more prisoners than the much more notorious symbols of Nazi repression, the concentration camps controlled by the SS. The author begins by examining the prison system and officials of the Weimar Republic. The system's focus on rehabilitation of criminals produced charges from the extreme right of leniency in prisons and demands for harsher discipline. Wachsmann shows how the Nazi legal apparatus remained largely in the hands of the same officials who had been in charge in Weimar. The great majority of German judges, prosecutors, and other senior legal officials broadly supported the Nazi regime, welcoming its revival of nationalism, authoritarianism, and militarism. By 1938 more than half the judges and prosecutors had joined the Nazi Party. Moreover, “the great majority of local prison officials remained in office after the Nazi ‘seizure of power’” (p. 78).

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