Late Effects of the Concentration Camp Syndrome

Introduction The hell that was the German concentration camps for its victims has been described in a number of vivid publications ranging from intensely subjective personal accounts to more broad-ranged and objective observations such as those of Bettelheim,1by Elie Cohen,2and by Kogon.3Consequently, no one of us, unless he deliberately wishes to do so, can avoid the guilt of knowing that he belongs to a species which produced the organizers and administrators of the conditions described in these books. However, the later fate of the human survivors of the camps as well as of those who endured the other manifestations of the Nazi tyranny is not as well known, and it is only since about the middle of the 1950's that there have begun to appear in the medical literature, especially from Germany,4-8and Israel,9articles describing psychiatric