Anne Nelson is an American author and media analyst. She graduated from Yale University and has taught at Columbia University since 1995. She has published extensively on the subjects of international affairs, human rights, and media issues. Her most recent book, Red Orchestra: the Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (2009), was named as an “Editors Choice” by the New York Times Book Review, and called “a literary and historical masterwork” by German historian Hans Mommsen in the Frankfurter Rundschau.
In the early 1980s Nelson worked as a journalist, covering the conflicts in Central America. She won the 1988 Livingston Award for her reporting on the Philippines. Following a stint as a researcher and editor at Human Rights Watch, she served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists from 1988-1992. Nelson consults extensively for foundations on international media issues. Her articles on the subject have appeared in the Carnegie Reporter, the Center for International Media Assistance, and PBS MediaShift.
Nelson has taught at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs since 2002. She lives in New York with her husband, British author and environmentalist George Black. They have two children, David and Julia. Nelson is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was named a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.
On page 50 of “Red Orchestra” there is mention of concentration camps. The reference implies they are pre-existing. Are these the same as the later, war time camps? Who established them? When?an en
Otherwise, although I have not finished yet, this is an excellent book which sheds an entire new light on events that led up to the war.
The term “concentration camps” predated Nazi Germany (the first reference I’ve found to them involved the Spanish counter-insurgency operations in Cuba in the 1890s). The Nazis set up camps outside Munich (Dachau) and Berlin (Sachsenhausen) soon after the 1933 takeover in order to sideline their political rivals. From 1933 to 1939, the camps were punishing and often murderous — but they were not extermination camps.
Things began to change after the 1939 invasion of Poland, and again after the 1941 invasion of the USSR. The camps in Germany grew even more brutal, and new camps were established in occupied territories.
Initially, the Nazis designed Auschwitz for Polish political prisoners and Soviet POWs. The Soviet POWs were subjected to mass murder. By 1942 the Nazis began to direct large populations of Jews to the camps as well, and to murder them in massive numbers.
The camps in Germany itself functioned throughout the war, and were the sites of extensive war crimes. But they were still different from the camps in the occupied territories, especially Poland. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum website features extensive materials on the history of the Nazi camps: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005214#RelatedLinks
What I’d like to know is why the author chose the same title as Gilles Perrault’s excellent account. Seems very bad form, as well as disrespectful.
Gilles Perrault’s book is one of many that bears the name the Gestapo gave to various groups. His 1967 book was called “L’Orchestre Rouge,” and was then translated into English as “The Red Orchestra.”
The CIA’s account was given the same title in German — “Die Rote Kapelle.” This is also the case of several German books on the subject, including the excellent 2001 work by Stefan Roloff, the son of one of the survivors of the Berlin group. It is surely not bad form, nor disrespectful, for any of these books to call the subject by its most commonly used name.
Hi Anne – I just learned about your book, it would be great to share a few words with you: my mother was the bride-to-be of Horst Heilmann and escaped to Denmark, where she – again – was persecuted, this time as a “fucking german”. I am half german, half danish and finally wrote a novel about it which became a danish bestseller and was published in german by insel verlag: “wer blinzelt hat angst vor dem tod” – if you have the time and interest, drop me a note. yours, knud romer