Ian Kershaw - This brilliant book sheds new light on Nazi Germany
Nikolaus Wachsmann - KL:
A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
Reviewed by Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler, a biography
Wachsmann shows how integral the concentration camps were to Nazi rule from the very beginning, how intrinsic terror was to the regime.
Is it possible to say
anything new about Nazi Germany? This is, after all, probably the most
thoroughly researched period in modern history. Of course, niche areas,
specific limited topics or local studies can invariably be found in any field
of research. But can a major work that alters our perceptions and influences
our interpretation still be written?
The brilliant study by
Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, which was this week awarded
the highly prestigious Wolfson
Prize for History, is the clearest demonstration that it is indeed still
possible, and necessary. Wachsmann teaches at
Birkbeck College, London. He was born in Bavaria, but has lived for many years
in England. He writes fluently and stylishly in English: even on the harrowing
subject of concentration camps, his work is eminently readable.
At first sight, the
need for a new history of concentration camps – “KL” was the Nazi regime’s
abbreviation for “Konzentrationslager” – seems improbable. Since the end of the
war, concentration camps have been synonymous with Nazi inhumanity.
Nearly two and a half million men, women and children passed through these
camps. More than 1.7 million died in them (nearly a million of them in
Auschwitz). Around 60,000 men and women served in the camps as guards and other
personnel.
The first general and
widely read history of the camps, by a former prisoner, Eugen Kogon, appeared
in 1946. The first memoirs of those who had suffered in the camps were
published soon afterwards. By now, more than 80 years after the end of the
Third Reich, tens of thousands of studies of aspects of the camps, including a
vast array of testimony of the victims, are available.
So what is new about
Wachsmann’s book, and why is it so important? Odd as it might seem, his is the
first comprehensive study of the camps, based on mastery of a huge literature
and stupendous research in many parts of the world. Its value lies in no small
measure in the way it weaves together the history both of the perpetrators and
of the victims. Wachsmann tells the
terrible story through the eyes of those who inhabited the camps. He writes of
the camps as places where people lived. Prisoners become individuals, not just
objects of terror. The behaviour of guards is shown to be more complex than mere
sadism and brutality.
A great virtue of the
book is the way in which Wachsmann differentiates the camps. He shows the
differences in organisation and structure as the vast camp network develops.
For many readers, these differences will be new. The best-known camps are
Dachau and Auschwitz. Both were places of horror, but with different purposes. Dachau, near Munich,
was the prototype SS camp, meant to be widely known as a deterrent to opponents
of the regime, especially at first communists. It served to hold prisoners who
were subjected to arbitrary terror and forced to labour until the point of
exhaustion, without any judicial protection, until (at least in theory) they
were fit to rejoin society as compliant citizens. Auschwitz, in a part
of Poland annexed by Germany in 1939, had all this too, aimed primarily at
recalcitrant Poles, but was unique within the system because it was an
extermination camp as well as a concentration camp.
The death camps
further east in German-occupied Poland (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka), on the
other hand, operated outside the concentration camp system. They did not
imprison people and force them to work. Their sole purpose was to kill the Jews
– close on two million, nearly all from Poland – as quickly as possible. But
within the KL system itself, Jews were a minority among the prisoners. The Holocaust,
as Wachsmann emphasises, mainly took place outside the concentration camps.
The value of the book
transcends its own topic, centrally important though that is. It offers, in
fact, a corrective to recent trends of interpretation of the Third Reich. Over
the past 20 years or so, general interpretations of Nazi Germany have tended to
swing away from the earlier emphasis on a population repressed into
acquiescence towards an image of widespread consensus with Hitler’s
regime. What consensus means, when those who disapprove are incarcerated in
concentration camps, is a moot point. Much of whatever consensus existed was in
any case manufactured. It rested on the terroristic repression of those who did
not consent.
Wachsmann shows how
integral the concentration camps were to Nazi rule from the very beginning, how
intrinsic terror was to the regime. It is not the least important conclusion to
be drawn from this remarkable book.
Ian Kershaw has
written extensively on the Second World War and Germany. His latest book, To
Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949
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