"The following pages present a micro-history of the basic architectural element of the labour service camps created during the Great Depression in Germany and the United States. ...The work of Oliver Razec, Allen Krell, and on the history and meaning of barbed wire provided general inspiration. The barbed wire fence developed to control cattle on the American prairies, became in the twentieth century the main tool to define the perimeter of the total institutions established to protect the community... Barbed wire has no place in defining the boundaries of total institutions that are purportedly established to better the pursuit of some work-like task. ...Yet, under conditions of total war, such camps came to be used to imprison people, and the barrack-huts developed for those camps became standard-issue shelter in newly established concentration camps that have become symbolic for the twentieth century, defined by Zygmunt Bauman as "the Age of Camps." ...[A] comparative study that considers the adaptive reuse casu quo metamorphosis of all the architectural elements that became the building blocks of the concentration camp - barbed wire fence, guard tower, gate, barrack-hut, latrine, delousing shed, [etc.] - and dynamic interrelation between those elements in the camp, will make an interesting dissertation on the history of modern architecture."