Sport in camps unsettles both contemporary witnesses and students of history. It seems impossible that human beings would perform anything like sport within the harsh camp reality of repression, hunger, violence, and possibly even murder. Yet, sport in penal and internment camps is a historical reality and studying this history allows for new insights into the reality of inclusion and exclusion in camps during the twentieth century. This volume will bring forward an understanding of camp experience that centres on subjectiv-ity, performance, and social action and aims at complementing the existing research on camps in the twentieth century with a comparative perspective of European history.Camps condense the history of violence throughout the twentieth century and mark off a genuinely violent age that for instance Zygmunt Bauman criti-cally called a “century of camps”.2 Camps for prisoners of war (POWs) and the internment of alien civilians appeared at the dawn of the twentieth century and gained broader significance during the two World Wars. Such “total institu-tions”3 confined thousands of human individuals in a small, tightly regulated space. The same spatial compression applies to the National Socialist concen-tration camps or the Stalinist Gulag system that merged forced labour with murder. Such violence was radicalised even more in extermination camps. In contrast to this, camps for displaced persons (DPs) or refugees lacked this radicalised violence but still strictly regulated the lives of their inhabitants. For many DPs, the camp was more than a transit station but was a long-time place of residence, often without a realistic perspective of moving on. Regardless of these specific and intriguing differences, camps as institutions central to the twentieth century induced experiences of violence, of an uncertain future, and total control exercised by both camp authorities and fellow internees.