Kl: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps By Nikolaus Wachsmann - 2015 - 881 Pages

Kl: A History  of the Nazi Concentration  Camps

By Nikolaus Wachsmann - 2015 - 881 Pages

In March of 1933 an abandoned factory in Dachau surrounded by barbed wire held 233 prisoners. Wachsmann traces out in a very detailed  narrative the complex sequence of events leading up to the 22 majors camps and over 1000 satellite camps located in Germany and Nazi occupied Europe.  The camps were at heart of the Nazis program of terror and repression.  As war dragged on they became an important part of the German economy and war effort.

The camps were quite different from each other. Auschwitz, the biggest camp, was primarily a place to murder Jews.  Other sites were work camps where the SS had economic reasons to keep workers alive such as Dora where V2 rockets were made by slave labor.  Inmates with skills valuable to the Germans had a much better chance of surviving longer.  I fascinated to learn that there was a unit of about 200 inmates who counterfeited British currency.  They worked inside, had better food and had a much higher survival rate than inmates working outside.  

Wachsmann is the first historian to write a complete history of the camps.  He shows us how The camps were organized while vividly detailing horrors, the sadism, and the central role in murdering those Nazi ideology dictated were parasites, sub-human and enemies of the State.  We see how German doctors were among the most vicious of camp officials, giving lethel injections, performing barbaric experiments and selecting which of newly arriving inmates were at once sent to be killed.

Gas Chambers were phased in as the primary method of Killing because Germans found shoting 

 them traumatic.

Wachsmann shows us The Germans failed attempt to turn Russian  POWs into slaves laborers.  Most were judged to weak and about two million were murdered.  Only about two percent of Russian POWs survived to return home.

Almost everyone who worked at the camps very long stole things that were supposed to be used in war efforts.

There is a lot of information about the Command structure of the Camps.

As the war started to turn against the Germans, hard core anti-semites began to panic, fearing they would not suceed in Killing all of the Jews in the camps.  As portrayed by Wachsmann,most all Germans knew what was going on in camps and did not care much one way or the other.

There is much more in this book.  

“Nikolaus Wachsmann is Professor in Modern European History at Birkbeck, University of London.

He studied at the London School of Economics, the University of Cambridge and at Birkbeck, gaining his PhD in 2001. His comprehensive history of the Nazi camps KL, published in 2015, won the Wolfson History Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate literary prize. Nikolaus has a particular interest in public history and Holocaust education, and serves on the academic advisory boards of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, as well as the concentration camp memorials Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. He also curates a free educational website for students and teachers about the history of the Nazi camps.” From https://www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/nikolaus-wachsmann/

Mel Ulm