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At the end of World War II, the Soviet secret police installed ten
special camps in the Soviet occupation zone, later to become the
German Democratic Republik. Between 1945 and 1950, roughly 154,000
Germans were held incommunicado in these camps. Whether those
accused of being Nazis, spies, or terrorists were indeed guilty as
charged, they were indiscriminately imprisoned as security threats
and denied due process of the law. One third of the captives did
not survive. To this day, most Germans have no knowledge of this
postwar Stalinist persecution, even though it exemplifies in a
unique way the entangled history of Germans as perpetrators and
victims. How can one write the history of victims in a "society of
perpetrators?" This is only one of the questions Displaced Terror:
History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany raises in
exploring issues in memory culture in contemporary Germany. The
study begins with a detailed description of the camp system against
the backdrop of Stalinist security policies in a territory
undergoing a transition from war zone to occupation zone to Cold
War hot spot. The interpretation of the camps as an instrument of
pacification rather than of denacification does not ignore the fact
that, while actual perpetrators were a minority, the majority of
the special camp inmates had at least been supporters of Nazi rule
and were now imprisoned under life-threatening conditions together
with victims and opponents of the defeated regime. Based on their
detention memoirs, the second part of the book offers a closer look
at life and death in the camps, focusing on the prisoners'
self-organization and the frictions within these coerced
communities. The memoirs also play an important role in the third
and last part of the study. Read as attempts to establish public
acknowledgment of violence suffered by Germans, they mirror German
memory culture since the end of World War II.
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