In March of 1933, a disused factory surrounded by barbed wire held 223 prisoners in the town of Dachau. By the end of 1945, the SS concentration camp system had become an overwhelming landscape of terror. Twenty-two large camps and over one thousand satellite camps throughout Germany and Europe were at the heart of the Nazi campaign of repression and intimidation. The importance of the camps in terms of Nazi history and our modern world cannot be questioned. Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann is the first historian to write a complete ...
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In March of 1933, a disused factory surrounded by barbed wire held 223 prisoners in the town of Dachau. By the end of 1945, the SS concentration camp system had become an overwhelming landscape of terror. Twenty-two large camps and over one thousand satellite camps throughout Germany and Europe were at the heart of the Nazi campaign of repression and intimidation. The importance of the camps in terms of Nazi history and our modern world cannot be questioned. Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann is the first historian to write a complete history of the camps. Combining the political and the personal, Wachsmann examines the organisation of such an immense genocidal machine, whilst drawing a vivid picture of life inside the camps for the individual prisoner. The book gives voice to those typically forgotten in Nazi history: the 'social deviants', criminals and unwanted ethnicities that all faced the terror of the camps. Wachsmann explores the practice of institutionalised murder and inmate collaboration with the SS selectively ignored by many historians. Pulling together a wealth of in-depth research, official documents, contemporary studies and the evidence of survivors themselves, KL is a complete but accessible narrative.
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Add this copy of Kl-a History of the Nazi Concentration Camps to cart. $53.42, good condition, Sold by Baggins Book Bazaar rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Rochester, KENT, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2016 by Little, Brown.
The title of this book stands for Konzentationslager in German, concentration camp(s) in English. Many excellent books have been written over the years about individual concentration camps in the Third Reich. However, this encyclopaedic work by Nikolaus Wachsmann can be regarded as the definitive history of the Nazi concentration camps. This study covers all of them, from their inception to the end of the Second World War. Although one usually hears and reads more about the twenty-two larger ones, there were hundreds of satellite camps, spread across Europe. The harrowing accounts of the the brutality, the torture, the killings and life under a permanent cloud of intimidation for those who were not eliminated immediately upon arrival, makes for grim reading and even now, seventy years after the end of World War II, when one thinks there is hardly anything left to be exposed about these camps, we are left wondering how the evil, oppressive and repressive Nazi regime could sink to such depths of monstrous depravity. How could they? How could anyone commit such heinous acts? How much do we still not know?
Wachsmann has done a remarkable job in producing this work. He was abe to access authentic documents and primary sources - including first-hand accounts from survivors of the camps - to uncover hitherto unpublished gruesonme details of everyday life in the concentration camps. His painstaking research has resulted in a brilliant, penetrating study, reminding us that we should never ever forget the Holocaust.
