Inside the KZ: Jewish Masculinities in Prewar Nazi Concentration Camps

Between 1933 and 1939, approximately 40,000 Jews were held in concentration camps, with the vast majority being men.¹ An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Jewish men died during this time as a result of violence, either inside the camps or from consequences of their imprisonment.² Such numbers led Jane Caplan to conclude that it took several years, until the end of 1937, before women’s camps “even began to diverge from the existing instructions and norms of women’s custody and even longer before the treatment of women inmates approached the standard brutality long applied to men.”³ Despite such gender-biased statistics, however, historians