Nikolaus Wachsmann. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.

Abstract

June 28, 2016 Harold Marcuse, Featured Review for American Historical Review, of: KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, by Nikolaus Wachsmann, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 865 pp., cloth $40. review: 2574 words with 130 struck through = 2444 (2500 max) The title of this prodigious but eminently readable work, KL, is programmatic. Instead of the more commonly known and used abbreviation for the German Konzentrationslager, KZ, Nikolaus Wachsmann has chosen the official Nazi abbreviation, which was guarded like a trademark by the system's potentate, Heinrich Himmler, who did not want competing camps outside of his system. KL reflects Wachsmann's attempt to roll back the veils of historiography and memory to reveal the system as seen by its contemporaries as it unfolded over time. This undertaking synthesizes numerous works of German scholarship, which since the 1990s have drawn upon a wealth of newly available sources to shed light on many aspects of the Nazi camp system. While a meticulous and innovative overview of the Nazi concentration camp system based on the latest scholarly research would already be a significant achievement, Wachsmann combines this scholarship with an encyclopedic knowledge of published and unpublished survivor accounts. The many corrective and illustrative anecdotes that lace this dense account also keep it engaging. Additionally, Wachsmann is attentive to the broader social, political and economic contexts within which the camp system evolved and operated. This enables him to revise longstanding preconceptions about the camp system, which have persisted because of its unique historiography. A look back at previous attempts to portray the entire system highlights the achievement embodied by KL. The first such attempt was made by Eugen Kogon, a non-party-affiliated anti-Nazi who was liberated from Buchenwald, where he had been imprisoned since 1939. Immediately after liberation the US Army commissioned the scholar-journalist to write a report about the camp system. Over the following months Kogon augmented and reworked his original Buchenwald Report, publishing it under the title Der SS-Staat in 1946. It was translated into English in 1950 as The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. Still in print today, the nearly 50 German editions and dozen translations of this book remained the only attempt at a comprehensive portrayal of Himmler's KL system until the 1990s. This is not to say that no scholars had written about the camps until then. Historians at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) compiled historical reports for the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963, soon published under the title Anatomy of the SS-State (1965, English 1968). Typical of works during this period, they were based almost exclusively on perpetrator-