Slavery and the Camp Systems in the 19th and 20th Century: From Private to State Slavery and Back Again

Buggeln analyzes the Third Reich's system of concentration camps from the point of view that forced labor in modern societies can become a form of slavery (even if it is not officially identified in these terms). The concentration camps are compared to two other tragically notorious forms of forced labor slavery in the American South prior to the Civil War, and the Soviet Gulag. Buggeln shows that the concept of slavery and slave-ownership in the twentieth century underwent changes: while in the nineteenth century slavery was based around the idea of the value of hard work (which did not meanwhile discourage slave-owners from murdering their slaves), in the forced-labor systems of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, the dominant idea was that of cheap mass labor that carried no independent value at all. At the same time, the concentration-camp slavery in the Third Reich and the SovietUnion had a number of specific features that are brought to light through comparing the two phenomena.