The most important aspect of the camps was the precedent they set. The concentration camp system within Germany in the 1930s was not very expansive—German colonial facilities in the 1890s were comparable, and the contemporary Soviet Gulag was more than a hundred times larger. German camps were chiefly important as a demonstration that organs of coercion could be separated by the Führer’s will and barbed wire from the law and the state. In this sense the concentration camps were training grounds for the more general SS mission beyond Germany: the destruction of states by racial institutions.
