Concentration camps of Nazi Germany as a phenomenon. Opportunities and the problem of understanding

Abstract

This article deals with the Nazi concentration camps as a phenomenon of social life and social thought in Europe in the mid-second half of the twentieth century. Today, when the world is experiencing a crisis of political and social institutions, there is less and less hope that this realization will happen. It describes the prerequisites for the formation of the system of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the forms of their functioning, and provides comparative data on the statistics of the number of camps. It is also pointed out the importance of understanding the processes of psychological destruction of a person in the camp.

Keywords

• concentration camp
• nazism
• psychology
• prisoner
• phenomenology
• memory
• totalitarianism