 First edition | |
| Author | Nikolaus Wachsmann |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Holocaust studies |
| Published | New York |
| Publisher | Little, Brown and Company, Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 2015 |
| ISBN | 9780374118259 |
| OCLC | 908628850 |
| Website | us |
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps is a 2015 book by Birkbeck College professor Nikolaus Wachsmann.
The book is named after the SS abbreviation, KL, for Konzentrationslager , the German word for "concentration camp". Another abbreviation, KZ, was used by prisoners and others informally, and eclipsed the popularity of KL in German after the war. [1] [lower-alpha 1] According to Harold Marcuse, "the official Nazi abbreviation ... was guarded like a trademark by the system's potentate, Heinrich Himmler, who did not want competing camps outside of his system." Wachsmann chose the original acronym to "reveal the system as seen by its contemporaries", Marcuse writes. [1] The book's epigram is a quotation from the Sonderkommando prisoner Zalman Gradowski: "May the world at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived." [3]
The book dispels the idea that German people were ignorant of what went on in the concentration camps. For example, some of the first concentration camps set up in 1933 were deliberately located in working-class neighborhoods of Berlin so that the population would learn what happened to Nazi opponents. [4] It also corrects misunderstandings that all concentration camps were similar. In fact, there was great diversity in them, especially between standard concentration camps and the extermination camps. [5] Wachsmann argues that the concentration camps were only peripheral to the Final Solution, because most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died in shootings, gas vans, or dedicated extermination camps rather than in the concentration camp system. [6] Although Jews made up a majority of deaths in concentration camps, they ranged from 10–30% of the population depending on the time period. [5] [6]
Throughout the book, Wachsmann presents a generalization and then complicates the picture with counterexamples. [7] The book is a work of synthetic history drawing mainly on published German sources, [1] although it also incorporates the author's archival research. [8] His approach is "integrated history" which attempts to create a full picture of events by examining them from all perspectives and contexts. Wachsmann argues that there were no "typical" prisoners, kapos, or guards. [6]
Wachsmann ends the book with a vignette about Moritz Choinowski, a Polish Jew liberated by the United States Army at Dachau. Choinowski had survived more than 2,000 days in concentration camps and wondered to another liberated prisoner, "Is this possible?" [6] [9]
The book was described as "prodigious but eminently readable" in a review by Harold Marcuse in American Historical Review . [1] According to Joanna Bourke, Wachsmann's book is a "significant [contribution] to our understanding of early-20th-century history." [6] She credits Wachsmann for being obsessed with precision and "a stickler for dates and times". [6] Thomas W. Laqueur considers the book "world-making history". [3]
In The Guardian , Nicholas Lezard described the book as "a huge and necessary contribution to our understanding of this chilling subject". He describes the book as both panoptic and intimate, in that it gives the big picture while humanizing the story with anecdotes. [4] According to a review by Keith Kahn-Harris in The Independent , the book "renders the unimaginable evil of the camps relatable". [10]
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Flossenbürg was a Nazi concentration camp built in May 1938 by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Unlike other concentration camps, it was located in a remote area, in the Fichtel Mountains of Bavaria, adjacent to the town of Flossenbürg and near the German border with Czechoslovakia. The camp's initial purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners for the production of granite for Nazi architecture. In 1943, the bulk of prisoners switched to producing Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes and other armaments for Germany's war effort. Although originally intended for "criminal" and "asocial" prisoners, after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the camp's numbers swelled with political prisoners from outside Germany. It also developed an extensive subcamp system that eventually outgrew the main camp.
Oswald Ludwig Pohl was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. As the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office and the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps, he was a key figure in the Final Solution, the genocide of the European Jews. After the war, Pohl went into hiding; he was apprehended in 1946. Pohl stood trial in 1947, was convicted of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death. After repeatedly appealing his case, he was executed by hanging in 1951.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, including subcamps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.
The Warsaw concentration camp was a German concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II. It was formed on the base of the now-nonexistent Gęsiówka prison, in what is today the Warsaw neighbourhood of Muranów, on the order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The camp operated from July 1943 to August 1944.
SS-Totenkopfverbände was a major branch of the Nazi Party's paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation. It was responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany, among similar duties. It was both the successor and expanded organisation to the SS-Wachverbände formed in 1933. While the Totenkopf was the universal cap badge of the SS, the SS-TV also wore this insignia on the right collar tab to distinguish itself from other SS formations.
Harold Marcuse is an American professor of modern and contemporary German history and public history. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the grandson of philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
Richard Glücks was a high-ranking German SS functionary during the Nazi era. From November 1939 until the end of World War II, he commanded the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, later integrated into the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office as "Amt D". As a direct subordinate of Heinrich Himmler, he was responsible for the forced labour of the camp inmates and was the supervisor for the medical practices in the camps, ranging from Nazi human experimentation to the implementation of the "Final Solution", in particular the mass murder of inmates with Zyklon B gas. After Germany capitulated, Glücks committed suicide by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule.
A kapo was one of prisoner functionaries, a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Extermination through labour is a term that was adopted to describe forced labor in Nazi concentration camps whose inmates were held in inhumane conditions and suffered a high mortality rate; in some camps most prisoners died within a few months of incarceration. In the 21st century, research has questioned whether there was a general policy of extermination through labor in the Nazi concentration camp system because of widely varying conditions between camps. German historian Jens-Christian Wagner argues that the camp system involved the exploitation of forced labor of some prisoners and the systematic murder of others, especially Jews, with only limited overlap between these two groups.
The SS Main Economic and Administrative Office was a Nazi organization responsible for managing the finances, supply systems and business projects of the Allgemeine-SS. It also ran the concentration camps and was instrumental in the implementation of the Final Solution through such subsidiary offices as the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and SS camp guards.
Lichtenburg was a Nazi concentration camp, housed in a Renaissance castle in Prettin, near Wittenberg in the Province of Saxony. Along with Sachsenburg, it was among the first to be built by the Nazis, and was operated by the SS from 1933 to 1939. It held as many as 2000 male prisoners from 1933 to 1937 and from 1937 to 1939 held female prisoners. It was closed in May 1939, when the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women was opened, which replaced Lichtenburg as the main camp for female prisoners.
Eduard Krebsbach was a former German physician and SS doctor in the Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen from July 1941 to August 1943. He was executed for atrocities committed at the Mauthausen camp.
The Concentration Camps Inspectorate (CCI) or in German, IKL was the central SS administrative and managerial authority for the concentration camps of the Third Reich. Created by Theodor Eicke, it was originally known as the "General Inspection of the Enhanced SS-Totenkopfstandarten", after Eicke's position in the SS. It was later integrated into the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office as "Amt D".
Nikolaus Daniel Wachsmann is a professor of modern European history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Gusen was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp operated by the SS between the villages of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and Langestein in the Reichsgau Ostmark. Primarily populated by Polish prisoners, there were also large numbers of Spanish Republicans, Soviet citizens, and Italians. Initially, prisoners worked in nearby quarries, producing granite which was sold by the SS company DEST.
On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz—a Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazis' "Final Solution" to the Jewish question—was liberated by the Soviet Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive. Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind. The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes. The date is recognized as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The early camps were extrajudicial sites of detention established in Nazi Germany in 1933. Although the system was mostly dismantled by the end of the year, these camps were the precursor of the Nazi concentration camps.
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