Concentration camps were much more than a corollary to National Socialism: they represented the most fully articulated manifestation of its ideology. From the very beginning, they formed the backbone of the Third Reich’s repressive apparatus and, through mass detention, deprivation, terror, and genocide they enacted its system of domination.

The ethos of the camps was embodied in the admissions process: a long-rehearsed routine of ritual violence designed to humiliate and dehumanize newly arrived prisoners. This routine was codified early on at Dachau, the first camp run by the SS, and the prototype and model for the horrors that would follow.

This talk will showcase the use of advanced digital techniques to shed light on one of the most crucial steps in the process, the removal of personal effects from arriving prisoners, and explore how we can use these objects to gain insight about their owners, the system that victimized them, and the distinctions it created, because while suffering in the concentration camps was universal, it was not equal.

Click here for more information on the Digital Futures Discovery Series, a monthly presentation series on digital innovations in research and teaching presented by Cabot Library and the DSSG.

About the Presenter

Gabriel Pizzorno is Lecturer on History and faculty chair of the Digital Scholarship Support Group at Harvard University. His interests cover a broad span of subjects—material history, digital history, ancient history, archaeology—and time periods—ranging from the second millennium BCE to the twentieth century. His teaching and research focus on the creation of innovative methodologies and tools that enhance our understanding of the human past by bridging scales and modes of analysis through the use of cutting-edge digital methods.