Music and concentration camps: An approximation

Abstract

Abstract The link between music and mass murder is considered, with attention to the ambivalent role that music assumed in the camps of the Nazi regime. If, on the one hand, music frequently offered prisoners a means of survival or of resisting— camp orchestras, musical activities in Theresienstadt, instrumental compositions, and songs written in camps are discussed here—on the other hand, music could become an instrument of torture and terror in Nazi hands. An afterword surveys recent scholarship in this area.