The Nazi concentration camps forced millions of people into settings of extreme stress, which continues to exert influence decades later. Because of the magnitude of the event, its origins and effects present profound difficulties to scholars, educators and concerned laypeople.

Originally published in 1980 Survivors Victims and Perpetrators overcomes many of those difficulties through a comprehensive, multidisciplinary analysis of the Nazi holocaust. Scholars from numerous fields collaborated to approach the phenomenon of the concentration camps from varying angles of perception.

The first chapters consider the history of the concentration camps, anti-Semitism, and political opposition to the Nazis in Weimar Germany. The following chapters discuss the fate of concentration camp survivors, their physical and emotional health, their methods of coping with the stress of the camps, their responses to psychotherapy, and their children’s difficulties in facing such a legacy. The book concludes with analysis of the Nazis’ behavior. Excerpts from the autobiographies of Goebbels and Hoess present a brief sampling of their world view. These are followed by psychological studies of the possible determinants of SS behavior.

The chapters are sensitive, challenging works of scholarship remarkably free from the specialized language of each field. At the time, there was no comparable book that approached the concentration camps from such a multidisciplinary perspective.

Survivors Victims and Perpetrators can be read on many levels. Intended for clinicians and students of psychology and psychiatry, it is conceptually accessible to readers in numerous other fields, including history, political science, and sociology. The book is a major contribution to courses in twentieth-century German history, political science, and Jewish studies.

Joel E. Dimsdale is Regent Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at University of California San Diego. He is a former career awardee of the American Heart Association and is past-president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine and is a previous guest editor of Circulation and former editor-at-large of Journal Psychosomatic Research. He has been a consultant to the President’s Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, the Department of Justice, NASA, and NIH.

In addition to Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators (originally published in 1980), he is the author of >500 publications, including Anatomy of Malice: the Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals (2016) and Dark Persuasion: the History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media (2021).