KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

ISBN-13: 9780349118666 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 880 str.

Nikolaus Wachsmann

Opis

The first definitive history of the Nazi concentration camp system, KL will remain an essential read for years to come.

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize and the Wolfson History PrizeIn 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 will examine 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.

Recenzje

It is hard to imagine that Nik Wachsmann's superb book, surely to become the standard work on Nazi concentration camps, will ever be surpassed. Based on a huge array of widely scattered sources, it is a gripping as well as comprehensive and authoritative study of this grim but highly important topic Ian Kershaw, author of The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945

O autorze

Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann was born in Munich, Germany. He obtained a PhD in History from Birbeck College at the University of London and was a joint winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History.