Verschwunden'

Tens of thousands of people were kidnapped for political reasons during the Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 and were tortured and murdered in secret detention centers. Only a minority were freed. To this day, 30,000 are "disappeared." The message from the survivors was ambivalent: on one hand, they saw it as their duty to testify to the atrocities of the camps. On the other hand, their reports contributed to the further traumatization of a terrorized society. Voices of survivors form the foundation of the investigation. However, to historically and sociologically contextualize their experiences, the study takes a further step. It analytically relates the Argentine detention centers to what is arguably the deadliest state terror apparatus of the 20th century: the system of Nazi concentration camps. Christian Dürr, PhD, is the head of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial Archive, an exhibition curator, and a freelance author.