Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion reprises the book’s main arguments: about the need to understand internment at once as an important Allied measure in its own right, but also as one that intersected in complex ways with other measures such as prosecution, denazification, and demilitarization; about the severity and coerciveness of the Allied purge, but also its differentiation; and about the underlying commonality of western and Soviet internment as an extrajudicial attempt to remove core Nazi personnel. The conclusion also considers internees’ reactions and internment’s impact, highlighting its role in clearing the way for new political institutions and new political elites, and thus in the democratization of western and the Stalinization of eastern Germany. The conclusion then addresses the question of how the camps should be characterized, in particular critiquing arguments made by some scholars for labelling the Soviet camps ‘concentration camps’. In order to capture their underlying similarity with, as well as important, lethal differences, from the western camps, the conclusion suggests the Soviet camps in general be understood as Stalinist internment camps, while those that held internees and SMT convicts be termed Stalinist internment and prison camps.