For decades after World War II and the Holocaust, historians generally assumed that most Europeans living in the vicinity of concentration camps during the war did not associate with them in any way during the war. Thereafter, they failed to processes what the camps were all about, as they put the past behind them, and simply got on with their lives. This book proves that this was simply not the case. It makes an important contribution to the growing scholarship that focuses on how Europeans processed the Holocaust and how they subsequently memorialized the camps in the decades after the war.
The book focuses on three concentration camps: Neuengamme near Hamburg, Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace, and Vugt in the southern Netherlands. It zeroes in on an understudied population: the locals who lived in proximity of these camps. These were individuals who “evolved to live with [them] during the war and afterwards” (2). The book seeks to determine the extent to which members of local communities were involved with the camps along with the modes of behavior they exhibited toward perpetrators and victims. Helen Whatmore-Thomson argues that locals were not “simply innocent collectives of ordinary citizens untouched by the presence of the camps; they were manifestly associated with it and part of the wider system that condoned it” (9).
The book makes the case that the camps could not have engaged in their nefarious wartime operations without the accommodation from local communities, which “provided manpower to help construct camps, adapted local infrastructure, and provided logistical support to the Nazis” (14). Traditional accounts about interactions between locals and camps emphasize indifference in the attitude of locals toward prisoners, but this book shows that this relationship was far more complicated than that. On the one hand, some tried to help prisoners by leaving them food and water, while “others detained prisoners until the SS came to capture them, or threw stones at prisoners as they walked through the village” (30).
As difficult as it is to admit, the camps also provided economic resources for local communities. “Local civilians . . . supplied all manner of goods and services. In return they gained secure jobs, earned handsomely, and were able to make use of a prisoner labour force” (41). Yet some locals were not indifferent to the plight of camp victims; they tried to help prisoners: one foreman removed terroristic SS guards from his workshop, and another “intervened to stop ‘his’ prisoners from being put on harsh labour details” (45).
After the war, locals had to adjust to changed circumstances, as “camps became part of the post-war justice apparatus by being hastily converted into internment camps for known, and suspected, perpetrators, traitors and collaborators” (57). In Vugt and Natzweiler, locals became both prisoners and camp employees, whereas in Neuengamme, “guards came from amongst the ranks of the Allies until 1946, when they were replaced by German civilians from the eastern regions” (65). The postwar years also witnessed the memorialization of the camps in Vugt and Natzweiler, but this process emerged more slowly in Neuengamme as “Germany was faced with the unique difficulties of commemorating the many victims persecuted by the Nazis . . . and those who had fallen in the war [as] Hitler's obedient servants” (70).
The author makes very clear the differences between memorialization in Germany vis-à-vis the countries that it occupied: “former occupied territories [such as the Netherlands and France] were more accommodating of KZ (concentration camp) memorialization,” whereas in Germany, “Hamburg's commemorative context acknowledged KZ's at large, but a number of factors began to conspire to downplay the presence of the local camp” (102). As a result, the first monument to Neuengamme was only built in 1953, and the camp's postwar repurposing as a prison “was intended to eliminate localized KZ memory” (139). Whatmore-Thomson reveals that, with regard to memorialization in Hamburg, “the bones of contention lay largely between those who had survived the hardship of concentration camps . . . and the Hamburg Senate . . . whose politicians . . . reacted to memorialization with helplessness, incomprehension and distance” (159). And whereas local populations near Vugt and Natzweiler were involved with memorialization of the camps from the 1940s through the 1970s, this process did not begin in the vicinity of Neuengamme until the late 1960s.
Interest in the camps moved to the forefront of European consciousness during the 1980s, thanks to the so-called memory boom, a time when “all countries would come to reassess, indeed recover more fully, their wartime pasts” (189). As notions of appropriate commemorative behavior began to change, concentration camps attracted more interest, especially in Germany. Memorial activists for KZ Neuengamme and religious authorities worked to grant the camp's remnants official protected-monument status (198). The memorial site gained in popularity as numbers of visitors steadily increased and “KZ memorialization became an ever more accepted practice” (200). Thanks to increased relevance of the camps, “local populations have become increasingly aware that they are irrevocably intertwined with their camps” (245).
Nazi Camps and Their Neighbouring Communities provides an exhaustively researched and comprehensive overview of the complicated relationship between local communities and the camps, and effectively explains how these relationships evolved over time. While the book includes maps of the camp memorial sites of Vugt, Natzweiler, and Neuengamme, the addition of pictures of memorial sites would have made a perhaps more compelling impression on readers. The book nonetheless convincingly delivers its message on the importance of memorialization as a means by which to “warn against the facile way in which people can slip into passive forms of onlooker behaviour, and in doing so to make people aware of the consequences of when prejudice or indifferences overrides moral responsibilities” (252).
