KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

The most comprehensive and authoritative history to date of the beginning of German concentration camps in the 1930s until the end of the war in 1945. Describes how the camps evolved over time into factories for mass murder and the commandants, kapos, etc. kept the crematory fires burning.

This reader expects that Wachsmann's "KL" will become the standard work on this subject.

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.

This is an amazing book. Nikolaus Wachsmann is a professor in Modern European History at Birkbeck College at the University of London, and a widely acknowledged authority and scholar on the Nazis. Tracing the concentration camps from their beginnings in 1933 through to the end of the war in May 1945, he weaves an incredibly complex story into a comprehensible and very readable narrative, If you've ever wondered about or wanted to understand more than you know the Nazi SS concentration camps, this is your book. It is definitive in every sense of the word. Highly recommended without any reservations at all.

This is an excellent overview of the vast KL system and its history from the 1930s through the end of World War II. Wachsmann's writing is particularly lucid, with a very readable mix of anecdotal and archival/statistical documentation.

The largely chronological organization helps reveal the evolution of the camps. It's easy to have just one picture of how the KL worked, but Wachsmann does a fine job showing how the camps not only had different purposes from each other, but that the purposes and methods of operation changed over time. One example he explores is how the work camps became statistically less deadly in 1943, in response to Himmler's orders to make prisoners more of a labor resource to outside industry.

Another particular strength is Wachsmann's showing how Nazi ideology swayed--and sometimes very far--to serve war expedients and the ambitions of commandants and their superiors. He enlivens his work by illustrating his conclusions with examples of particular individuals, both well-known historical figures and numerous people whose fate was to be swept into the brutal world of the camps.

Wachsmann tackles some of the conventional wisdom about the camps and the prisoners (such as that all kapos were sadists, that prisoners became completely dehumanized, that women formed close bonds but men didn't), presents his views and reasons for his conclusions. Wachsmann has a clear-eyed, pragmatic and logical style. He is no prisoner of ideology in his approach.

Along with another stellar recent work, Sarah Helm's Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women, this will be a resource for years to come.

This book contInued much information I did not know after 30years of teaching world history,however, it was filled with unnecessary statistics.. It needed to focus on the most human stories of prisoners and guards. A bit took long.

If you love history, and moreover, if you are fascinated by WWII, you are like me. You've read tons of books on the topic from major battles to the holocaust. This book is a great addition to the knowledge of concentration camps and the Nazi reign of terror. It provides a high level history of the concentration camp from the inception of the first camp--Dauchau--to liberation in spring 1945. But it is more than a factual account. The book brings in dozens of individual stories to underline various practices in the camp. Some of them were written by inmates while they were incarcerated, and then the accounts were hidden on camp grounds. The book also demonstrates the banality of the Nazi evil by presenting SS accounts where they complain about their working conditions, etc. and never recognize their own depravity. There is also a wrap up of what happened to inmates, guards and commandants following liberation. I started by saying "If you love history..." and the reason for that is this is a long book and detailed. But I never lost interest.

an extremely long book but it is full of fascinating stories taken from Nazi records and balanced by accounts by survivors as well as allies fighting the Nazis The KL was a bigger part of the war plan than I pictured. It was a death camp system for Russian solders Jews and anyone that could not provide the slave labor many camps were intended to provide. A true police state weapon that provided a special prison for anyone the government needed to get rid of or wanted to work to death. Other parts of the KL were hundreds of smaller camps located near labor intensive industry and special projects. A skilled worker may have a "relatively" easy life in some camps, but all were the worst type of prisons where at best, prisoners were considered subhuman. Without the KL the Nazis would never have had the labor to build its wonder weapons and infrastructure. Overall a pretty sad picture of human kind but many stories go with the KL or are parallel stories going back ti its inception in pre war time as well as its changes as the war progressed.

Overall its a must read book, but not an easy book to stomach for several obvious reasons. I had to put it down several times. . I got the audio book version and am happy with that production.

KL delivers an exhaustive study of Nazi Germanys concentration camp system that is easily accessible by the reader. This highly examined part of the Third Reich gets a refreshing coat of paint with some great research and insights by those who survived, worked and died in these pieces of hell on earth.

The author takes great care in giving the reader a very rounded view of these camps from all angles. His extensive research for this book shows in every nook and cranny as he weaves together a narrative that chills you to the bone.

As holocaust books go this is up there as one of the best as the author paints a comprehensive picture of this low point in human history. But the most important part of this book for me is that he has given the dead a voice and in that he has let them live on in the readers memory.

This is a thorough, in-depth, deeply reseached history of the entire story of Nazi concentration camps, from the first improvised ones shortly after the Nazi takeover, to the establishment of Dachau, then its expansion, to other concentration camps, and Auschwitz as the first and main "death camp."

Waschmann details how SS camp guards became more coarsened through time, if they weren't at the start, by peer pressure. He discusses the complex situation of Kapos in general and with several specific examples. He ties the later camps to slave labor. And more.

A must-read book.

This book is one to get through the audible option. I suggest reading in sections with breaks as it is very detailed and the KL was disgusting. As a friend suggested, you will may need a box of kittens to cuddle between chapters. Dont let that put you off though, this is a MUST READ, especially in today's political climate.

An astonishing achievement of scholarly research. This massive tome is unsurpassed on many levels, including its ability to keep the reader fully engaged in such grim subject matter. It is a beautifully written, factual and poignant examination of man's inhumanity to his fellow man. If you start reading it, you won't be able to stop.

heartbreakingly complete, scholarly yet personal, I took 3 months to read it because that's as fast as I could stand to process this information.

people are capable of great evil and it is our responsibility to face this; I cannot claim to have enjoyed this book but I'm certain I needed to read it.

This is a remarkable account of the history of the dreadful concentration camps following my read up of the famed book "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" by William L. Shirer. Together these two books give me a complete history and the undoings of the Third Reich. This new book on the history of the concentration camps is indeed the answer to the incomplete interesting past history of Germany that greatly affected Europe and the world during WWII era.

As might be expected for the author of "Comrades, Avenge Us," I looked in the index for any mention of the Ljubelj Tunnel. Nada.
I started reading and found a whole batch of mentions of Hans Beimler, once a Communist member of the Reichstag. But it never mentioned his death in defense of Madrid.
I looked for the murderous SS doctor Ramsauer who injected gasoline into the hearts of prisoners, saying they were subhuman Nada/