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Nikolaus Wachsmann, Arbeit und Gewalt. Das Auβenlagersystem des KZ Neuengamme, German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 595–597, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq081
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Towards the end of Nazi rule, from about autumn 1943 onwards, the SS concentration camp system started to fragment. As the demand for slave labour—from army, state, municipal authorities and private industry—became increasingly desperate, a huge number of satellite camps sprang up across Germany. As a result, most of the 700,000 prisoners in late 1944 were held in satellite camps, not main camps such as Dachau. In the first decades after the Second World War, this phenomenon—the late decentralization of the camp system—remained little understood. The focus of early historical works was almost exclusively on the main camps; even Karin Orth's outstanding survey of the camp system, published in 1999, had little to say about satellite camps. Today, the picture looks very different. Lately, a vast number of new studies have appeared. Our knowledge has grown so fast that the recent German encyclopaedia of concentration camps, edited by Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, devotes far more space to the hundreds of satellite camps than to the main camps. But the expansion of scholarship has come at a price. With the rapid growth of work on individual satellite camps—often rich in minute empirical detail, but poor in analysis—it has become impossible to discern broader trends and themes. What we need are systematic studies of the satellite camp system, building on existing work and new research. Mark Buggeln has written exactly such a study.
