The Role of Music in Concentration Camps

Abstract

In the past decades, Holocaust studies have focused on researching the annihilating structures of concentration camps, while the study of the inmates’ everyday lives and their strategies for survival was not included in this field of work. However, studying aspects of daily life and survival in the concentration camps can serve to truly bring out the brutality of the Holocaust. Music, for example, was an integral part of everyday life in the camps and did not solely serve to entertain the inmates, but also represented an additional form of torture for them, as previous studies for the time period between 1939 and 1945 have documented. Fackler’s study investigates the extent to which this was the case in the early concentration camps between 1933 and 1936. Furthermore, he attempts to document continuities in the role music, beginning from the early camps till the later phase between 1937 and 1945. However, while Fackler succeeds at pointing out various connections between musical phenomena in different camps, he does not succeed at offering an overview of the role of music in concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. Fackler’s work serves as a useful anthology for researching music in different concentration camps, although his analysis is limited to the study of men’s camps.