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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1991 6(2):167-184; doi:10.1093/hgs/6.2.167
© 1991 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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THE DESTRUCTION OF HUMAN IDENTITY IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS: THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO AN ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR UNDER EXTREME CONDITIONS*

FALK PINGEL

Georg Eckert Institute Braunschweig, Germany

This article examines the question of whether it is possible to use categories of the social sciences when analyzing the behavioral patterns of concentration camp detainees. The study illustrates that despite widespread arbitrary and harassing treatment, not only chance and chaos were at the root of the inmates' attempts and strategies to assert themselves in the camps. There rather was an emergence of social groups and strata who had different possibilities of action and chances of survival. The author objects to an absolutizing of psychoanalytical approaches which would mostly involve unverified hypotheses concerning the inmates' psychological way of coping with their experience

*Translated by William Templer, Institute for German History, Tel Aviv University


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