Volunteer Learning Series with the Education Team: Identity & Othering in the Nazi Camp System

The camp system was the heart of Nazi terror and control, and it eventually played a dominant role in the systematic murder of approximately six million Jewish people and an unknown number of non-Jewish people in the Holocaust. After Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, the first camps emerged within the following two months. What began as a central component to consolidating power and silencing opposition, the camp system grew and changed purpose over the years. When the war broke out in September 1939 and Nazi Germany began occupying countries, the Nazi camp system grew and expanded into those occupied countries. The camps offer a unique way to examine citizenship, identity, and othering, and to explore how those concepts informed prisoner experiences within the camps – both from perpetrators and from other imprisoned people. Using geographic concepts to inform examinations of the camp system allows for a deeper understanding of the role of geographic and national identity, the concept of othering and exclusion – both internal and external – in constructing national identity, and how these identities came together in the microcosm of Nazi camps and influenced the experiences and chances of survival for those imprisoned in them.

This session will be at Am Shalom synagogue at 840 Vernon Ave., Glencoe, IL 60022, and will begin at 10 a.m. and will go through 12 p.m. Kosher refreshments will be provided.