Hitler's Prisons Legal Terror in Nazi Germany 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 labour, 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.

'Building on innumerable studies of the Nazi legal system by eminent German, British and American scholars, Wachsmann has assiduously burrowed through a large number of German archives to tell his gloomy and gory tale' - The Sunday Telegraph

'Hitler's Prisons is a timely and welcome addition to the scholarship on Nazi Germany, and a book that genuinely deserves to be called original. ... This is an exemplary study...[a] dynamic reading... Wachsmann tells a neglected history of Nazi inhumanity with sympathy but without sentimentality...offering an authoritative and sobering account of this hitherto barely acknowledged subject.' - Jane Caplan, German History Journal

'Hitler's Prisons fills a gap in our knowledge of Nazi policies of repression and is undoubtedly fundamental to any understanding of them. ... One of the greatest strengths of this volume is that it does not isolate the subject, and never loses sight of the broader political context. ... Wachsmann's findings should be made accessible to a broader aaudience...' - Jurgen Zarusky, German Historical Institute Bulletin