Liberation Without Freedom: the Prisoners of the Nazi Concentration Camps in Post-War Europe and the Problem of Retribution

In the article the author takes a close look at the mental health and mental condition of prisoners after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the issues that prisoners had to endure. «L’Univers concentrationnaire» (‘concentration camp universe’ to use the French writer David Rousset’s terminology) of Nazism was a unique phenomenon, a place where history was replaced by mythology, where the archaic, prelogical forms of thought and action were resurrected, where rules and laws, which were upholding the European civilization, were abolished. That world was based on violence and death. It was this world that became the highest, absolute point of totalitarianism, the place where an attempt was made to create a fundamentally new person - both physically and spiritually - in the shortest time possible by means of unprecedented moral and physical pressure. Millions of people passed through the system of Nazi concentration camps, many of them did not survive. Both the «concentration camp universe» and the exodus from it meant either the crisis or the collapse of the value system of the prisoner. The problem of retribution for suffering and adaptation in post-war society arose. The survivors of the Nazi concentration camps remained largely misunderstood by others and by themselves, leading a large proportion of the survivors to the state of being reluctant to talk about the past. Today it can be argued that what contemporaries hear from the living or heard from the already deceased prisoners about the «concentration camp universe» is not what the former prisoners wanted or want to say to the world. The article analyzes in detail the reasons why, from the point of view of the prisoner, the expected retribution did not take place, as well as psychological and social problems of self-identification of the prisoner as a reliable witness of the experience. An attempt is made to answer the following questions: why the prisoners couldn't find understanding in the post-war society and what the reason was for the emergence of the thesis about the «penitent nation» of post-war Germany.

Keywords

concentration camp, prisoner, liberation, retribution, understanding, oblivion

Received

13.03.2020

Publication date

13.03.2020

Number of characters

51110

Cite

GOST	Iakemenko B. Liberation Without Freedom: the Prisoners of the Nazi Concentration Camps in Post-War Europe and the Problem of Retribution // Novaia i noveishaia istoriia – 2020. – Issue 1 C. 110-126 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://nni.jes.su/S013038640008190-7-1 (circulation date: 19.04.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S013038640008190-7
MLA	Iakemenko, Boris "Liberation Without Freedom: the Prisoners of the Nazi Concentration Camps in Post-War Europe and the Problem of Retribution." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 1 (2020):110-126. DOI: 10.31857/S013038640008190-7
APA	Iakemenko B. (2020). Liberation Without Freedom: the Prisoners of the Nazi Concentration Camps in Post-War Europe and the Problem of Retribution. Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (1), pp.110-126 DOI: 10.31857/S013038640008190-7

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