KL

Starred review from February 16, 2015
“The concentration camps embodied the spirit of Nazism like no other institution in the Third Reich,” writes Wachsmann (Hitler’s Prisons)—at least 2.3 million people passed through them; at least 1.7 million died in them—and yet there exists no comprehensive analysis of the camp system, its principles and dynamics, or the forces and people that shaped it. Wachsmann, of Birkbeck College, University of London, fills that gap brilliantly. Working from a mass of documentary evidence—some of which was only made available in the last quarter century—and with a corresponding body of first-person accounts, he establishes the camps, referred to as KL (from the German konzentrationslager), at the center of the Nazi terror system. Wachsmann demonstrates that “the main constant of the KL was change,” and the system’s protean, responsive nature sustained and exemplified the Reich. He clears up many popular misconceptions about the camps. Whatever was needed, be it mass killing or sustaining the war effort by slave labor, the KL served to extend the Reich’s lifespan. “The closer men, women, and children were to freedom , the more likely they were to die in the concentration camps.” Wachsmann’s exhaustive study will be seen as the authoritative work on the subject.

Starred review from January 15, 2015
A harrowing, thorough study of the Nazi camps that gathers a staggering amount of useful and necessary information on the collective catastrophe.In a tightly organized, systematic narrative, Wachsmann (Modern European History/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, 2004, etc.) presents an "integrated" treatment of the Konzentrationslager of the title that moves beyond any attempt to endow the camps with universal meaning. He looks at forces both inside and outside the camps, from Hitler's ascension in early 1933 to the liberation by the Allies in the spring of 1945. The author tries to move away from looking at the camps as occupying "some metaphysical realm" and stick to primary sources that reveal the voices of the prisoners and the perpetrators. To deal with the mass arrest of Hitler's enemies in the spring and summer of 1933, the earliest camps morphed from existing workhouses and state prisons located all over Germany (Wachsmann provides maps of the camps as they evolved over the years), housing mostly political prisoners and communists, with Jews constituting only a small percentage, to a template fixed at Dachau, which SS leader and Munich police president Heinrich Himmler established as the "first concentration camp." Schooled in brutal, bloodthirsty methods, the guards were encouraged to treat the prisoners as animals, running the camps in relentless military fashion, employing routine terror, forced labor and euphemisms regarding the murders of inmates as "suicides" and "shot trying to escape" for PR purposes. The camp system grew with the purge of SA leader Ernst Rohm and other "renegades" in July 1934 and took off with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, after which Jews numbered predominately. As the war progressed, so did the methods of mass extermination, from mass shootings to the Auschwitz gas chamber: first weak prisoners, then Soviet POWs, then Jews. A comprehensive, encyclopedic work that should be included in the collections of libraries, schools and other institutions.

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November 1, 2014

Established in 1933 and dismantled at war's end in 1945, Germany's concentration camps have become frighteningly familiar. But as shown here by Wachsmann, professor of modern European history at Birkbeck College, University of London, there's much more to learn. Wachsmann probes the latest scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown beyond Germany, to clarify not just experiences within the various camps but how the camp system worked as a whole and how it was shaped by ever-shifting political, social, economic, and military considerations. Likely the one book you'll need on the subject.

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