KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

"It’s phenomenal. There’s a reason it’s the only book on my list that’s not a memoir. Even people who know the history, or even teach the history, of the concentrations camps probably don’t actually know how the Nazi camp system came about. What Wachsmann has done with this book is taken the millions and millions of detainees, the millions murdered at locations which, as the Germans extended their reach, stretched across Europe, and spanning more than a decade—the most horrific evolution of concentration camps in history—and compressed it all into one volume. It also has quite a lot of small, personal pieces of information so you do get the human side as well, but it’s the information side of it that’s extraordinary. I think before this book no one had really looked, in a coherent way, at how the camps started. And they started very much like camps around the world at the time started, which is one of the reasons why there was not this sense that this was a new, horrific thing that no one had ever seen before. It was a known thing. People did worry about them; Dachau had a very bad reputation right from the beginning. There was a sense that this camp might be worse and that they might be roughing people up more. But there had also been atrocity reports from the camps in World War One, most of which turned out not to be true. So, there was some real scepticism among writers and thinkers about some of the early reports that did come from the camps. Mostly people thought it was quite normal. “Anything that wasn’t the mass extermination of a people using factory technology suddenly wasn’t a concentration camp anymore” Wachsmann traces these camps from when they start, in the first weeks and months of Nazi rule and the Third Reich, at a time when they would have been indistinguishable from camps in a number of places around the world. He shows the power struggles between different people in the Nazi hierarchy as they evolve and who wins those fights. Are they going to keep up this system of extrajudicial detention? Or are they going to try to bring it back under the court system? He also traces the architecture of these camps, how they try to maximize these Nazi ideals of order and structure. You begin to see the physical evolution of these camps into something different. They slowly change from being mostly for political opponents, at the beginning, into social engineering tools to use on marginal groups they didn’t think fitted into society—like gay people, vagrants, what they called ‘gypsies’ and we would now call Roma and Sinti peoples. Then, with Kristallnacht, they became a tool to use against German Jews. The Nazis had, of course, been doing terrible things to German Jews before then, but they were doing them legislatively. They had been stripping them of citizenship and limiting their rights, but one of the things Wachsmann shows is that it’s in 1938 that camps become a tool to use against German Jews en masse in a direct way. You see that in the evolution of the Nazi concentration camp system, there isn’t this clear line, right from the beginning, of how it’s all going to happen. It takes them several years and lots of trial and error to figure out that they even want to have camps at the heart of a genocide . His book just presents the entire growth of this system through to the death camps, with an understanding that they were both leading it, but they were also experimenting and learning from it. This unbridled experimentation in the middle of a eugenic state was a disaster, but he outlines exactly how it unfolded. He has beautiful data and examples and it is so comprehensive. It’s very well written too. Some people think that somehow lessens the violence that was done to the Jewish community. It doesn’t at all. I think it’s almost more horrific that they didn’t start out knowing that they could use this tool this way, that they sort of came into it over time. And yet they managed, by the time they were defeated in 1945, to have created this extermination machine that killed so many millions of Jewish people. One idea he tries to get across in the book is that the intentions that you start out with, and where you end up, can be quite different. Sometimes that’s because circumstances take over, like war. Sometimes it’s because of negligence, and people not taking the time to site a camp well, so maybe there was no fresh water nearby. They weren’t necessarily setting out with a genocidal impulse, but you can still reach that level through bad planning, The Nazi example shows that it takes time, but that the longer you have and the more evil your intent, if you’re left a free hand, the worse you can make it. The concentration camp system was such a flexible tool that it allowed them to do worse and worse things; they realized they could do worse and worse things. By the time the camps had been in place for a number of years, it was almost impossible for the citizenry—if they had been motivated to, and let’s be frank, the Germans were not motivated to in that moment, many of them—to resist them, or stop them. It was beyond a matter of what could happen to the Jews, it was a system that could steamroll an entire society. That’s what we’ve seen with the Soviet system and the Chinese system, that the camps become a way of controlling the entire society. It really varied. This is the thing a lot of people don’t realize, that more than 90 per cent of the people who were held in the first five years, and even the tens of thousands of German Jews who were locked up in 1938 with Kristallnacht, more than 90 per cent of them were released. Initially, the camps were not supposed to be a death sentence. They were a reform tactic to control society and bend everyone to their will. So some people had—I don’t want to say a benign experience—but something more like Cohen-Portheim’s from World War One, with some forced labour thrown in and maybe a little scarier. You knew there were dangers attached to your situation, but that you were likely to go home. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . If you were a political opponent, particularly a Jewish political opponent of the Nazis, then you might not come out. Jewish political opponents had a good chance of being tortured and there was a real chance of dying, even early on. But before 1938, German Jews were not rounded up in groups and sent to camps and for most of the people who experienced the camps during those years Wachsmann shows that they went home. It took time to evolve into a much worse thing."