Inside the Nazi concentration camps Jewish prisoners experienced extreme forms of exclusion, humiliation and violence. Disqualified as the “countertype” of the “Aryan” man, they were denied not only their participation in the “national community” but also their male dignity. This paper looks at various attempts of Jewish prisoners to preserve and assert their gendered identities in the face of terror by analysing three different manifestations of masculinity to be found in autobiographical sources: the ideal of the revolutionary fighter for the class struggle, the ideal of the emancipated “Bildungsbürger” and patriarch, and finally the ideal of the soldier internalised through Jewish men’s active participation in the German wars
