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Despite the enduring preoccupation with the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps as the universal symbol of terror, a systematic study of the history of Jewish camp inmates has been long neglected. This article investigates the history of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s, important sites of the anti-Semitic persecution and exclusion of Jews from German state and society. Using the example of the arrest and detention of Jewish jurists, it analyses the importance of the camps in the development of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies. It then focuses on the internment of so-called race-defilers ( Rasseschänder), which started long before the promulgation of the Nuremberg Racial Laws of September 1935. Furthermore, research attention is turned to the conditions inside the concentration camps, looking at housing, forced labour and violence. Finally, the mass arrests of Jews in 1938 will be studied and a glimpse into the period of the Second World War will briefly discuss how the advent of the military conflict changed the imprisonment of Jews in the concentration camps.