A book such as this must aim not to be comprehensive but to ask relevant questions. This book ranges widely, drawing on a voluminous scholarly literature, and I hope that readers will find some clearly defended opinions and some suggestions for thinking about the topic in greater detail. But most of all I hope that they will not expect all the answers; if the questions I raise are thought-provoking then the book has done its job. There are many other paths to follow than those taken here and I hope the book will encourage readers to go down some of them. This is an unpleasant topic but one that can hardly be sidestepped if one is interested in the nature of the modern world. I have not spent too much time on highfalutin theories of what it all means—though I linger with some of these ideas in the final chapter—because I wanted to explore the ways in which different sorts of concentration camps have emerged in different political, social, geographical, and chronological contexts over the last century or so. Only by knowing something of the history of concentration camps can one begin to consider their meaning for our civilization. The book is therefore arranged more or less chronologically, only turning at the end to address theories of what concentration camps tell us about the modern world.
Many friends and colleagues have helped me along the way. Not least of these are the many scholars on whose work I have drawn, details of which can be found in the references and suggestions for further reading. Some of the ideas in this book were tested at seminars at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of Bucharest, the University of Sussex, and the University of Southern California, and I’m grateful to colleagues at those institutions for their input. I am especially grateful to my colleagues who put me right on numerous points of fact, who have challenged me to set my ideas out more clearly, or otherwise helped shape the book. In particular, it’s a pleasure to record my thanks to Daniel Beer, Anne Berg, Mark Donnelly, Geoff Eley, Christian Goeschel, Michelle Gordon, Helen Graham, Wolf Gruner, Becky Jinks, Christoph Kreutzmüller, Florin Lobonţ, Robert Priest, and Nikolaus Wachsmann for providing me with useful references and for taking the time to read some or all of the book in draft form. I would especially like to thank Jens Meierhenrich, who provided a very careful and helpful reading of the manuscript.