This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination and concentration camps. After World War 2 ended in 1945, the need to provide care for survivors of the National Socialist (Nazi) regime’s camps led to a series of specialised medical and psychological publications, as well as a literature of testimony. Physicians were among the survivors, including an influential group in Strasbourg, France, who published testimonies; many of them were doctors of Jewish descent deported to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and to concentration camps. But the representations of trauma in the mid-20th century are not those of today. Diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) only appeared in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classification in 1980 and physicians relied on different diagnostic categories in the post-war years. Of course, some of the survivors who lived into the late 20th century may have been diagnosed with PTSD. But in the years after the war medicine drew on earlier diagnostic concepts.