KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

This is a very strenuous read - and well worth the effort. I learned so many things not taught in schools about the history of the camps. For many of the pre-war years the camps primarily held political prisoners (with no killing involved). Over time the camps expanded to encompass more types of prisoners and the brutality increased. As a reader I drew many life lessons from this book. It is funny that as cruel as the camps were the prisoners never sought to change the behaviors that put the prisoners in the camp in the first place (political ideology, race, sexual orientation, anti-work attitudes). In the instances when prisoners were released many of them returned to the camps for the same reasons as before. This is the same kind of recidivism we see in modern prisons. My point is that forcing human beings to do things does not work in the long run. Even in the case when Nazis had extreme control over the population of Germany and Nazi-occupied states they still ultimately were defeated. And they were not effective in changing the minds of the people who opposed them. This is why am a Libertarian. It is best to allow people to be themselves so we can all enjoy a high level of freedom. The net result of Nazi Germany’s methods is that most of the high ranking officials wound up dead or imprisoned. Millions of people were murdered in war and in camps. And now the first thing people think of when Germany is mentioned is Nazis. Forcing people to do what you want them to do does not work. This is true for families, countries, and political ideologies. This book is 800 pages of proof of that. My props to Nikolaus Wachsmann. This is a great and worthwhile book. Thank you Nikolaus.

This is a truly amazing book. Exhaustively researched, and extremely well written. One warning : I could only read so much of this excellent book at a time. It is detailed, and graphic, as it should be; reading it will affect you.On a personal note: my father, uncle, and their parents were inmates in concentration camps. I wish this book had existed (and that I had read it) while they were all still alive. I would have had a deeper appreciation for the horrors they lived through, and survived. I would have understood them better.

This is an incredibly comprehensive account of all you could ever want to know about the Nazi concentration camps...history, politics, organization, sociology, interactions with industry and populace, etc. etc...it's all here. This scholarly work is certainly not for the casual reader, nor is it recommended for the faint of heart, as the shear detail and often sickening description of camp horrors will present quite a challenge to any reader. Nonetheless, the book is very well organized and the style is highly readable and engaging, and the author balances his exhaustive statistical analyses with individual survivor testimony and anecdotes. Despite a lifelong interest in this subject, this book taught me much that I did not really appreciate, perhaps the most important being the breadth of suffering inflicted by the camps on all of Europe's population, not just Jews.However, despite the exhaustive descriptive analysis of every aspect of these camps, the ultimate question of how so many "ordinary" Germans could have readily participated in such unspeakable brutality remained elusive to me. I certainly do not fault the author for this, for this lay outside the scope of an historical description, but I would have welcome his views on the subject nonetheless.Finally, I read this book on my Kindle, and in doing so I realized that the Kindle format still has some way to go before it approaches the experience of a hardbound book such as this. For example, there are a number of maps and photos that were very difficult to make out in their reduced size (some of them could be modestly enlarged, but others could not be). Also, navigating between the text and exhaustive index was very cumbersome using the touch screen. Lastly, the author's exhaustive footnotes were very uninformative in the Kindle links, as it had many obscure abbreviations that could only be deciphered from the index table that wasn't readily accessible on the Kindle. Some of these problems probably have work-arounds, but they are still inferior to quickly thumbing through the pages of a real book.

I purchased this book as historical background for a biography I just completed. It is an exhaustive exploration of the Nazi German concentration camp system, and I believe its a "must read" for professional and amateur historians of this topic. The author is an academic, but it is not written in the painfully boring style that is frequently the case with such volumes. I would certainly read this for my own interest, even if I didn't need it for research.

This is a very scholarly and detailed book that shows the beginnings of the Nazi concentration camp at Dacau just outside of Munich to the ultimate Final Solution of enemies of the state. I would not recommend this book as an overview of the system but for a history buff and/or scholar there is great depth to the information and highly recommended

Comprehensive history of the German concentration camp. Depressing to read what people are capable of. And still no lessons learned.1

Von diesem Buch hatte ich mir einen Einblick in die Struktur der faschistischen Vernichtungsmaschinerie und der Beweggründe/Motivation der handelnden Personen erhofft. Gleichzeitig verspricht der Verlag Augenzeugenberichte, also den Blick aus dem Inneren des Systems.Man muss dem Autor zugute halten, dass er sich einem sehr schwierigen Thema genähert hat. Wachsmann unternimmt den (leider nicht gelungenen) Versuch, die KZ-Organsation der Nazis quasi isoliert von der Entwicklung Nazi-Deutschlands zu betrachten. Allgemeine Entwicklungen streift er nur am Rande, die Einflussnahme Hitlers wird fast gänzlich vernachlässigt, die verschlungenen Strukturen kann er nur ansatzweise entwirren.So verliert sich fast die Hälfte des Buchs in endlosen Aufzählungen von Häftlingszahlen, Todesfällen und statistischen Zahlen zu den einzelnen KZ's. Es kostet unendliche Geduld, sich hier hindurch zu kämpfen und das Buch nicht frustriert aus der Hand zu legen. Erlebnisberichte von Häftlingen sind m.E.viel zu sparsam eingestreut, fast gewinnt man den Eindruck, der Autor benütze sie nur dazu den Leser bei der Stange zu halten, um gleich darauf wieder in Zahlenwerke abzugleiten.Das wird m.E. dem Thema und vor allem den Opfern nicht gerecht. Sicher, alle Zahlen sind minutiös recherchiert und entsprechen sicher auch den Tatsachen. Trotzdem bleibt das Ganze seltsam leblos, wie aus großer Distanz betrachtet und (fast) emotionslos geschildert. Ich hätte mir etwas mehr Gefühl für die Leidtragenden erwartet und keine wissenschaftlich-distanzierte Herangehensweise. Vielleicht ist das aber auch der einzige Weg, mit dem unfassbaren Grauen der Nazi-Vernichtungsmaschine umzugehen, ohne sich darin zu verlieren.Was bleibt ist das Gefühl, ein wissenschaftlich gut recherchiertes, mit Details und Daten vollgestopftes Werk gelesen und das eine oder andere dazu gelernt zu haben. Meine Erwartung, irgendeine Form der Erklärung wenigstens andeutet zu bekommen, hat sich aber nicht erfüllt. Zu kurz gekommen sind mir auch die zig Millionen Opfer des Systems - denen zieht Wachsmann gefühllose Statistik vor.Trotzdem ist das Buch im historischen Kontext wichtig, da es umfassend schildert und beschreibt, in dieser Form gibt es das kein weiteres Mal. Aber eben wissenschaftlich. Für mich kein Grund es weiter zu empfehlen, aber auch kein Empfinden der Reue, es gelesen zu haben.

A huge reference work examining the creation and running of the German camps during the 1930s and 1940s. From the initial small, almost randomly run work camps through to the final solution and the death camps. KL is a complete look at the political, social and economic regime of those times and delves deep into the background of those groups and individuals who actively encouraged the growth of the camps for their own purpose. I found the history of the early camps particularly interesting particularly in that they were more about containing political prisoners rather than places used for the extermination of entire ethnic groups but; the change was quick to come about and terrifying in its brutality. Nikolaus Wachsmann tells a compelling story and backs up his work with multiple cross references in the form of notes and indexes. His delivery is particularly compassionate in the final section of the book and yet without bias throughout. Although a long, complicated journey I found KL fascinating and quite easy to read. I would honestly recommend to all.

A valuable contribution to our knowledge and understanding of one of the darkest periods of history. In a field which has created a whole cottage industry of voyeuristic holocaust porn this book is richly detailed, balanced and offers genuinely insightful and scholarly analysis.The book presents compelling arguments which challenge and dispel many myths which have grown up around the holocaust as it tracks the evolution of the concentration camps (the writer uses the contemporary SS abbreviation "KL" throughout) from ad hoc pop up establishments which could differ hugely, through the SA transition to the SS and the regime of Theodore Eicke, the descent into mass death during the war, the holocaust and the final forced labour camps. The author demonstrates that contrary to popular belief the early camp era was brutal and laden with violence but until quite late in the KL story the mortality rate was quite low (although inmates suffered dreadfully) and that until very late in the camp story Jew's were peripheral to the KL story. The book makes the distinction between the KL and the three extermination camps Sobidor, Treblinka and Belzec although the KL story blended into that of the holocaust as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek became both KL and extermination camp.The book shows that the KL were set up to hold political prisoners and that the early victims of the KL were predominantly communists, socialists and those who had opposed Nazism during Hitler's rise to power. Later they were joined by a variety of groups including criminals, anti-socials, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, gypsies/roma and Jews. The story of most of these groups has been lost as a result of the focus on the Jewish holocaust. Yet, until 1942 or so Jews were not generally a significant part of the KL and in the build up to the final solution extermination the Jewish victims of Nazism were generally confined to ghettos before being taken to the extermination camps and it was later that the KL story and the holocaust story came together. The story then follows the final few months of the camps existence when conditions became atrocious and inmates were worked to death or abandoned to die but where the systemic selection and killing process had ended.One of the recurring themes in the book is the relative status and interaction between different prisoner groups, the position of Kapos and the impossible choiceless choices and debasement of moral and ethical values of inmates in the camps. The story includes much detail of the brutality of KL life and death yet never falls into the sort of cheap voyeurism of many holocaust books. The use of the KL population in human experiments is recounted in detail.The book examines the KL organisation and those who manned the KL exhaustively, from the early SA thugs, the more regimented and organised but in many ways even more vile era of the camp SS created by Theodore Eicke and the final period where the idea of the KL as an elite (in their own estimation) was destroyed by the drafting of almost anybody not considered suitable for service at the front into the KL SS. The figure of Eicke looms large, despite his thuggish and extremely repressive violent attitudes and his role in evil it is hard not to also accept that he also had charisma and real leadership qualities. One of the big mistakes in many works is to equate evil with stupidity when the much more troubling truth is that some of the KL SS were far from being stupid or devoid of qualities.The book identifies two key landmarks in particular in the KL story, the decision to make the KL a permanent institution in 1934 as the SS took hold and the second was the evolution from cruel and inhumane internment/forced labour to mass killing following the invasion of the USSR, starting with the extermination of Soviet PoW's. The book recognises the influence of the T4 euthanasia program. Although it is easy to conflate the KL and the holocaust they were separate and distinct and even at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek the work of extermination was undertaken in parallel with the KL aim of detention and forced labour. One might argue that the hideous mortality rates of the KL in the final year of the war in particular make it a moot distinction however even in the end game of the infamous death marches and the accumulation of the infirm in Bergen-Belsen it was not an extension of the holocaust.The knowledge and attitudes of ordinary German's are considered and as with the other aspects of the KL considered by the book a nuanced and objective assessment is offered. The writer is of the functionalist school of holocaust theory as opposed to the eliminationist theory, i.e. that Nazi policy evolved and radicalised over time and that there was no pre-determined plan to exterminate large swathes of the people under their control in the 1930's and that repression and brutality turned to extermination in response to events and circumstance. My own opinion is that such a nuanced and balanced assessment actually has more power than the simplistic and non-credible opinions and eliminationist ideas provided by books such as "Hitler's Willing Executioners". Certainly, it is very hard to see certain German's such as Albert Speer and certain industrialists as having been ignorant of the regimes crimes despite their carefully crafted post war arguments.The final epilogue is very moving. I find it hard to imagine anybody publishing a better work on the subject. The book is well written and never feels laboured. My only real criticism is that it would have been nice to have more analysis of the psyche of the KL SS and the effect of the brutality of the camps on the guards. The book notes the controls on violence instigated to maintain the "decency" of the KL SS but then fails to really follow this as the camps descended into orgies of violence and death. However this is an outstanding book, 5*.