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Legacy

Since their liberation, the Nazi concentration camp system has come to symbolize violence and terror in the modern world. After the war, most Germans rejected the crimes associated with the concentration camps, while denying any knowledge or responsibility. Under the West German policy of Wiedergutmachung (lit. ' making good again '), some survivors of concentration camps received compensation for their imprisonment. A few perpetrators were put on trial after the war.

Accounts of the concentration camps – both condemnatory and sympathetic – were publicized outside of Germany before World War II. Many survivors testified about their experiences or wrote memoirs after the war. Some of these accounts have become internationally famous, such as Primo Levi 's 1947 book, If This is a Man. The concentration camps have been the subject of historical writings since Eugen Kogon 's 1946 study, Der SS-Staat ("The SS State"). Substantial research did not begin until the 1980s. Scholarship has focused on the fate of groups of prisoners, the organization of the camp system, and aspects such as forced labor. As late as the 1990s, German local and economic history omitted mention of the camps or presented them as exclusively the responsibility of the SS. Two scholarly encyclopedias of the concentration camps have been published: Der Ort des Terrors and Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. According to Caplan and Wachsmann, "more books have been published on the Nazi camps than any other site of detention and terror in history".

Stone argues that the Nazi concentration camp system inspired similar atrocities by other regimes, including the Argentine military junta during the Dirty War, the Pinochet regime in Chile, and Pitești Prison in the Romanian People's Republic.