Songs From Hell

Music and music activities,alongside the whole history of Nazi Concentration Camps,had long been one vital element of the prisoners daily lives.Divided from the year 1936,the development of the camp music can be seen as two parts.In the first phase,many camps were converted from prisons in Weimar times which imprisoned German political and criminal culprits as majority.Music appeared in this phase can be classified as the White,the Gray or the Black due to validity reasons.In the second phase the contradictions between different prisoners community stood out and showed its complexity.Both population and the number of prisoners' groups had greatly increased,leading to a hierarchy system made by the SS which created conflicts between the communities.All these made the music in the second phase show characters of new kinds.In this phase,'ordinary prisoners' made by mainly non-German internees still had liberty of holding music activities of different types.But as the deterioration of the situation of the war and the establishment of the Vernichtungslagers,the surviving conditions for prisoners had gone worse and it lowered the chance of volunteer cultural activities.By comparing different sorts of music activities from different prisoners'groups and different period of time,a landscape of Concentration Camps' daily routines had been shown.Various SS cultural policies had also revealed the true attitude it held towards prisoners' culture.