Research on organizations and bureaucracy has focused extensively on issues of efficiency and economic production, but has had surprisingly little to say about power and chaos (see Perrow 1985; Clegg, Courpasson, and Phillips 2006), particularly in regard to decoupling, bureaucracy, or organized resistance. This dissertation adds to our understanding of power and resistance in coercive organizations by conducting an analysis of the Nazi concentration camp system and nineteen concentration camps within it. The concentration camps were highly repressive organizations, but, the fact that they behaved in familiar bureaucratic ways (Bauman 1989; Hilberg 2001) raises several questions; what were the bureaucratic rules and regulations of the camps, and why did they descend into chaos? How did power and coercion vary across camps? Finally, how did varying organizational, cultural and demographic factors link together to enable or deter resistance in the camps? In order address these questions, I draw on data collected from several sources including the Nuremberg trials, published and unpublished prisoner diaries, memoirs, and testimonies, as well as secondary material on the structure of the camp system, individual camp histories, and the resistance organizations within them. My primary sources of data are 249 Holocaust testimonies collected from three archives and content coded based on eight broad categories [arrival, labor, structure, guards, rules, abuse, culture, and resistance]. These testimonies produced 440 “prisoner-camp” events for the analysis of nineteen camps including death camps (Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka), labor camps (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Buna, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Plaszow, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof), and transit camps (Bergen-Belsen, Drancy, Theresienstadt, and Westerbork). In the first chapter, I show that the camp system was formed with a clearly defined set of draconian rules and punishments designed to control political prisoners. Yet, as the war progressed, broad institutional changes (including the introduction of competing economic and ideological goals), shifting organizational conditions (particularly the rapidly expanding size of the camps), and ideological beliefs (including a racial-ethnic hierarchy that encouraged dehumanization and division) coalesced to create a context where guard behavior could decouple from the formal structure of the camp. The decoupled conditions created an ambiguous and often chaotic environment for prisoners. In the second chapter, I focus to how power and coercion varied across the camps. Drawing on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin 1989; 2001), I locate the organizational characteristics and methods of control associated with high and low mortality in the camps. I find that camps with chaotic and bureaucratic control or chaotic conditions and surveillance were associated with high mortality. Conversely, camps with bureaucratic control and structural violence (but without chaotic control) as well as labor camps with absent or negligent bureaucratic and chaotic controls were associated with low mortality. I draw on these set conditions to theorize four broad coercive organizational forms’ coercive, negligent, chaotic, and tyrannical, and how they relate to power. Finally, my third chapter investigates the organizational and demographic camp characteristics associated with the emergence of organized resistance groups. I find that camps with chaotic organizational conditions and a high proportion of Jewish prisoners were more likely to hold organized resistance groups. Conversely, camps with cruel low level elites and low proportion of Jews were more likely to have no organized resistance. Collectively, these findings show that prisoners’ assessments of threat were exacerbated by the chaotic conditions of the camps but that resistance groups needed sympathetic, or at least agnostic, low level elites in order to have space to resist. The rules and regulations of the camps provided a brutal basis for control, but as demographic, economic, and ideological pressures expanded, camp conditions became more chaotic. However, these conditions were not evenly distributed across camps. The camps where prisoners were most likely to describe chaotic conditions ¿ in conjunction with bureaucratic controls or surveillance ¿ were most likely to have high mortality rates. Chaotic conditions also motivated resistance as some groups of prisoners, seeing fewer opportunities for survival and more severe threats to their lives, were motivated to organize resistance groups. These findings hint at the possibility that the characteristics that made the camps monoliths of terror, also offered the means and motivation for resistance