KL: a History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Free

FREE KL: A HISTORY OF THE NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS PDF

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — KL by Nikolaus Wachsmann. In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system th In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called "the gray zone. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Examining, close up, life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps of the twentieth century. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about KLplease sign up. It is shocking to read story after story showing the slide of supposedly "normal' people in abnormal times who wanting to get out of a secretarial job, or off the farm, or out of a career dead end who saw a stint in the KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps SS as a stepping stone that may boost their careers. Who upon arrival in the KL found the lure of being arbiters of life and death over untermensch completely corrupting? Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. The newly elected senator was unrepentant and defended the phrases use. At the time I was saddened to think that in this day and age KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps senator from a minor political faction had had to resort to the outrageous to get attention. With that incident in mind, and reaching the end of this book, I am now of the opinion that the entire KL system and all the consequences of its existence must be part of the education curriculum in Australia. It is a historical event that must be told and understood. With that in mind this may not be the book to be part of that curriculum and that is not criticism. The reality is that this amazing work of scholarship is for the individual that is aware of the Holocaust and the treatment of those that the Nazis deemed as enemies of their moribund ideology. The depth of research is superb. The mix of analysis, statistics and first-hand accounts make a compelling, though very tough read. I admit to having a rest several times from when I first began this in early May to finishing now in late September. The subchapter "Killing the Weak" was profoundly mind numbing and I repeat what I have said before to others, man's inhumanity to his fellow man never ceases to amaze. As I get older I am still none the wiser. Author Wachsman has written his history in chronological order. I found his footnotes excellent and was constantly scurrying to research the new information covered in this book. There KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps a very good abbreviations section to assist with the various acronyms. The sources section covers archival, electronic and printed sources and if at this point in time I wished to read further on the subject it would be the ideal resource to refer to. View all 23 comments. Apr 21, Paul Bryant rated it it was amazing Shelves: probably-neverholocaust-literature. To relieve the camp, it is necessary to remove simpletons, idiots, cripples and sick people as quickly as possible through liquidation. This is a brilliant remarkably detailed enormous plainly-narrated history of the whole Nazi concentration camp KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. I have read enough to say that, and to know that although it's scholarly pages of notes at the back it's fluently wr To relieve the camp, it is necessary to remove simpletons, idiots, cripples and sick people as quickly as possible through liquidation. I have read enough to say that, and to know that although it's scholarly pages of notes at the back it's fluently written and anybody with a desire for this melancholy knowledge will find it a compelling read. I realised, however, that I've already read enough about the Nazis and their millions of murders to last me a lifetime. There are probably dozens of existing books, some excellent, which are now replaced by this single volume. I read a lot of those. I don't need to know more. But this book, if you do need to know, is totally recommended. View 2 comments. Aug 17, Brett C rated it it was amazing Shelves: holocaust. I learned a great deal from this well researched and well written book. I liked how it was written as it wasn't boring, didn't put me to sleep, and I didn't feel bogged down in the details. Instead the narrative kept me engaged and was a page turner for me at least. The SS, the work details, the horror, and all the inner workings of the camp system were very interesting. It was interesting to read the KL system's start with Dachau in and how it became the example camp for others to emulate. The whole KL camp system started concentration camps for political prisoners, asocial types, and some Jews. Eventually the camps and their satellite camps increased as did the number of prisoners. The author breaks down the history in three sections: the early pre-war s, the war period, and the eventual Final Solution. I learned how the camps evolved from hard labor and beatings and punishments, to the philosophy of "annihilation through labor" and starvation model, and lastly to the systematic destruction and the Final Solution. Like I said: well written, well researched, and very informative. This is probably the best book out there on the Nazi concentration camp subject. Highly recommended for anyone interested in this subject. Mar 19, Stephen Robert Collins rated it it was amazing. I read this in four days that shows how good it was it was one hell of horrible book. It was my top book of but how can I say was "good book" how? Depressing subject biggest supprise was that Concentration Camps were not a German invention but a British one the first camp was used during the Boer War to hold prisoners so once again The Victorians were to blame. We have lot blame. The photos of the Camps are haughting and make you feel sick unless you are a heartless bastard. It was also not I read this in four days that shows how good it was it was one hell of horrible book. It was also not just the KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps people who ended up in them but gypsies, gays and anbody that may said something about the Hitler. Neibours turning friends, family turn on each other it is all here. If you are wanting real horror book this it. View all 3 comments. Sep 17, Stefania Dzhanamova KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps it it was amazing Shelves: wwii. Nicholas Wachsmann's book is an intimate and highly disturbing history of the Nazi Concentration camps. The brutality detailed in it is astonishing. Of approximately 2. Many went straight to their deaths, including the Jews slaughtered on arrival and without registration in Auschwitz. Others suffered a slower annihilation, Nicholas Wachsmann's book is an intimate and highly disturbing history of the Nazi Concentration camps. Others suffered a slower annihilation, reduced to ghastly skeletons. Wachsmann argues that eighty years after the founding of Dachau, there is no single complete account of the concentration camps, and aims to rectify this gap in our understanding of the KL. The first of the estimated camps — not including the 30, labor camps — was Dachau, which became operational in Established near Munich, it targeted mainly the political opponents of the Nazi, subjecting them to harsh imprisonment and occasionally murder. It was a disorganized, brutal camp, whose guards were unrestrained in their treatment of political dissidents. The sadistic treatment of prisoners shocked many even among the Nazi. Auschwitz in and Dachau in were utterly distinct, but were a part of the same lawless universe. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps | Jewish Book Council

Of an estimated 2. It was, just. Through his atrocious odyssey, Choinowski experienced the various degrees of Nazi depravity under Hitler. There were gradations of horror. They were not monolithic. Nazi leaders pursued ever more extreme aims, and so the KL expanded, even as domestic political opposition diminished. Dachau in — when it was established near Munich as the first of what would become 27 main SS camps — and Auschwitz in were utterly distinct. Yet they belonged to the same lawless universe. Dachau, at the outset, targeted political opponents of the Nazis, often Communists, subjecting them to harsh imprisonment and occasionally capricious murder. Auschwitz, by the penultimate year of the war, was a sprawling death complex, its gas chambers filled with the screams of the dying, its crematoriums smoking endlessly: a flesh-fed destruction line for European Jewry, Gypsies and others. It was sustained by a corps of SS lifers of strikingly similar backgrounds — born around the turn of the 20th century, shaped KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps the humiliation of German defeat in World War I, radicalized by the paramilitary struggle against the Weimar Republic and at last KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps loose to indulge every sadistic fantasy as well as enjoy the considerable perks of their posts, like the swimming pool and tennis courts at Dachau. Once absolute power had been learned at the repressive level, it could readily be extended to the annihilationist level. The camps nourished their own, pushing their overseers to levels of brutality perhaps not even they had imagined at the outset. At pages, it is, in every sense, no light read. In fact it is claustrophobic in its evocation of the depths to which people can succumb. Readers may find themselves wanting out, but there is always worse to come. The book does not upend our understanding of the camp system, whose core elements are well known by now. But it imbues them with agonizing human texture and extraordinary detail. This is as relentless a chronicle of the collapse of an entire society and civilization — from its doctors drawn to every inhuman experiment KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps its foot soldiers looting the dead — as may be imagined. By the end of the war their myriad satellite industrial camps were everywhere, hard to ignore. The SS camps were the expression of the Nazi ideology to which Germans, in their overwhelming majority, acquiesced. They existed to free Europe of Jews and other undesirables, lock in the Aryan master race, empty the east of its citizens for German Lebensraum and cow any resistance through systematic terror. For a dozen years, and with steady intensification, they did their foul work, mostly ignored by the Allies despite growing evidence of the Nazi genocide. It is sobering to reflect that three of the most murderous places — Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka — do not fall within the scope of the book because, as death camps exclusively rather than also work camps, they were not part of the SS network, reporting to authorities in Lublin rather than Berlin. One Olga Lengyel arrives in Auschwitz determined to protect her son from hard labor. She is asked by an SS physician strange oxymoronDr. Fritz Klein, how old her son is. She says he is under 13, although he looks older. The boy is promptly sent to the gas. Wachsmann makes the unimaginable palpable. That is his great achievement. They could not believe what was about to happen to them. To be frank, they had not really cared to pay much attention. Justice, inevitably, was imperfect. Quickly, Cold War imperatives took over from the quest for justice: West Germany was needed to fight Stalin. Germany slowly recovered and in the end KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps made whole. The mystery remains. The Holocaust can never quite be digested, even when it is dissected into such minute detail. Home Page World U. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

The tall Steinbrenner looked down on the haggard prisoner in his filthy brown jacket and short trousers, whom he had tortured for days in the camp's lockup, the so-called bunker. It is all over in two minutes. But he knew that time was running out. Only an hour or two earlier, Private Steinbrenner and the Dachau SS commandant had shown him into another cell, where he found the naked corpse of Fritz Dressel, a fellow Communist politician, stretched out on the stone floor. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps the previous days, Dressel's screams had echoed through the Dachau bunker and Beimler assumed that his old friend, unable to bear more abuse, had cut his wrists and bled to death in fact, SS men probably murdered Dressel. Still in shock, Beimler was dragged back to his own cell, where the commandant told him: "So! Now you know how to do it. He was given little more than twelve hours to live. Beimler was among tens of thousands of Nazi opponents dragged to makeshift camps like Dachau in springas the new regime, following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor on January 30, rapidly turned Germany from a failed democracy into a fascist dictatorship. The early hunt for enemies of the regime focused above all on leading critics and prominent politicians, and for the authorities in Bavaria, the largest German state KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Prussia, few prizes were bigger than the thirty-seven-year-old Beimler from Munich, who was regarded as an extremely dangerous Bolshevik. When he was arrested on April 11,after several weeks on the run with his wife, Centa, local officers at the Munich police headquarters were jubilant: "We've got Beimler, we've got Beimler! A veteran of the imperial navy mutiny of autumnwhich brought down the German Empire at the end of World War I and ushered in the Weimar Republic, Germany's first experiment in democracy, Hans Beimler had fought single-mindedly against the republic and for a Communist state ever since. In springhe had served as a "Red Guard" during a doomed Soviet-style uprising in Bavaria. After the brittle German democracy had weathered the initial assaults from the far left and right, the trained mechanic became a fanatical follower of the Communist Party of Germany KPD. The rough and gruff Beimler lived for the cause, throwing himself into battles with police and opponents like Nazi storm troopersand rose steadily through the ranks. In Julyhe reached the pinnacle of his party career: he was elected as a KPD deputy to the Reichstag, the German parliament. On February 12,during one of the final Communist mass gatherings before the national election of March 5, the first and last multiparty elections under HitlerHans Beimler gave a speech in the Munich Circus Krone. To rouse his supporters, he invoked a rare victory from the civil war, when Bavarian "Red Guards," Beimler among them, had briefly crushed government forces near Dachau. He ended his speech with a prophetic rallying cry: "We'll meet again at Dachau! Just ten weeks later, on April 25,Beimler did indeed find KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps on the way to Dachau, though not as KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps revolutionary leader, as he had predicted, but as a prisoner of the SS. The brutal twist was not lost on him or his gleeful captors. A group of SS men was already waiting in giddy anticipation as the truck carrying Beimler and others pulled up in Dachau that day. The mood among the screaming guards was "electric," Private Steinbrenner later recalled. They jumped on the prisoners and quickly pulled Beimler out for his first beating, together with a few more denounced as "swine and traitors" by the commandant. Forced to wear a large sign saying "Welcome" around his neck, Beimler was marched toward the bunker, which had been set up in the former toilets of the old factory building now used as a camp. On the way, Steinbrenner hit Beimler so hard with his horsewhip that even prisoners far away could count each blow. Among the Dachau SS, wild rumors spread about Beimler, their new trophy prisoner. The commandant falsely claimed that Beimler had been behind the execution of ten hostages, including a Bavarian countess, by a "Red Guard" detachment in a Munich school back in spring This massacre—overshadowed by the subsequent slaughter of hundreds of leftist revolutionaries by far-right paramilitary units, the Freikorps, which crushed the ill-fated Munich Soviet—had fired the imagination of right-wing extremists ever since. Passing around graphic photographs of the murdered hostages, the Dachau commandant told his men that, fourteen years later, they would exact revenge. At first, he wanted to kill Beimler himself, but he later decided that it would be more discreet to drive his victim to suicide. On May 8, however, after Beimler had held out for several days, the commandant had had enough; either Beimler used the noose or he would be murdered. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night. After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler's cell early the next morning, on May 9,and found it empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: "Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you'll tell me [where Beimler is]. Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the camp, "Wanted" posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler's arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the "famous Communist leader," who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears. Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in Munich, he was spirited away in June by the Communist underground to Berlin KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps men to "kiss my ass. First published in German by a Soviet press in mid-Augusthis pamphlet was soon serialized in a Swiss newspaper, printed in English translation in London, and secretly circulated inside Germany. Beimler also wrote articles in other foreign papers and spoke on Soviet radio. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Nazi officials, meanwhile, denounced him as "one of the worst peddlers of horror stories. The decision by the Nazi authorities in late autumn to strip Beimler of his German citizenship was no more than an empty gesture. After all, Beimler had no intention of ever returning to the Third Reich. Hans Beimler's story is extraordinary. Few prisoners in the early Nazi camps were targeted as mercilessly as he was; inattempted murder was still the exception. Even more exceptional was his escape; for many years, he would remain the only prisoner to successfully flee from Dachau, as the SS immediately strengthened its security installations. Still, Beimler's story touches on many key aspects of the early camps: the violence of guards driven by a hatred of Communists; the torture of selected prisoners, partly to intimidate the great mass of other inmates; the reluctance of the camp authorities, who were liable to judicial oversight, to commit open murders, preferring instead to drive selected prisoners to their deaths or KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps dress up murders as suicides; the high levels of improvisation, evident in the SS use of the broken-down Dachau factory; and the prominent place of the camps in the public sphere, with press reports, underground publications, and more. All these elements shaped the early camps that emerged in the nascent Third Reich in In the early afternoon of January 30,on the anniversary of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps appointment as chancellor, Adolf Hitler addressed Nazi grandees in the defunct Reichstag, taking stock of his first four years in power. In a typically rambling speech, Hitler evoked a gloriously resurgent Germany: the Nazis had saved the country from political disaster, rescued its economy from ruin, unified society, cleansed culture, and restored the nation's might by throwing KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps the shackles of the despised Versailles treaty. Most remarkable of all, Hitler claimed, was that all this had been achieved peacefully. The Nazis had captured power back in "almost KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps without bloodshed. But overall, Hitler boasted, he had overseen a completely new kind of uprising: "This was perhaps the first revolution during which not even one window was smashed. It must have been hard for Nazi bigwigs to keep a straight face as they listened to Hitler. All of them remembered well the terror ofand in private they continued to revel in the memory of the violence they had unleashed against their opponents. However, fully entrenched as the regime now was, some self-satisfied Nazi leaders might have been keen to forget just how precarious their position had been just a few years earlier. By the early s, the Weimar Republic had been in terminal decline, pulled apart by a catastrophic depression, political deadlock, and social unrest. But it was not yet clear what KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps replace the republic. Indeed, even though they were deeply hostile to each other, the two main parties of the Left—the radical Communists KPD and the moderate Social Democrats SPD —gained more combined votes in the last free KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps of November than did the Nazis. It took the machinations of a small cabal of antirepublican power brokers to install Hitler as chancellor on January 30,as one of only three Nazis in a cabinet dominated by national conservatives. Within a few months of Hitler's appointment, the Nazi movement had been swept to almost total control, riding a wave of terror which engulfed, above all, the different parts of the organized working class. The Nazis smashed their movements, ransacked their offices, and humiliated, locked up, and tortured their activists. In recent years, some historians have downplayed the significance of this prewar Nazi terror. Caricaturing the Third Reich as a "feel-good dictatorship," they suggest that the regime's popularity made a major onslaught against its political enemies largely superfluous. But popular support for the regime, important as it was, only ever went so far, and terror was indispensable for silencing the millions who had so far proved resistant to the lure of Nazism. So-called racial and social outsiders were targeted, too, but early repression was directed, first and foremost, at political opponents, and here above all at those standing on the left. It was the primacy of political terror that set the Nazis on the road to absolute rule. The promise of national rebirth, creating a new Germany out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic, lay at the heart of the popular appeal of Nazism in the early s. But the Nazi dream of a golden future was always also a dream of destruction. Long before they came to power, Nazi leaders KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps envisaged a ruthless policy of exclusion; by removing all that was alien and dangerous, they would create a homogenous national community ready for battle in the coming racial war. This dream of national unity through terror grew out of the lessons Nazi leaders had drawn from the German trauma of The importance for Nazi ideology of defeat in the First World War cannot be overstated. Unwilling to face the reality of Germany's humiliating defeat on the battlefield, Nazi leaders, like many other German nationalists, convinced themselves that the country had been brought to its knees by defeatism and deviance on the home front, culminating in the supposed "stab in the back" of the German army by the revolution. The solution, Hitler believed, was the radical repression of all internal enemies. In a private speech ina time when the Nazi movement was still consigned to the extreme fringes of German politics, he promised to annihilate the Left. There could be no peace and quiet until "the last Marxist is converted or exterminated. Extreme political violence had blighted Weimar from the start, and when the Nazi movement grew in strength in the early s, bloody confrontations began to scar the country on an almost daily basis, nowhere more so than in the capital, Berlin. The paramilitary armies of the Nazis—with their huge storm division SA and the much smaller protection squad SS —were on the offensive, disrupting rival political meetings, assaulting opponents, and smashing their taverns. Crucially, the Nazi movement gained political capital from these clashes with Communists and Social Democrats, reinforcing its image among nationalist supporters as the most dedicated opponent of the much-hated Left. Following Hitler's appointment as chancellor on January 30,many Nazi activists were itching to settle accounts with their enemies. But their leaders were still treading cautiously during the first few weeks, mindful about going too far too soon. Then, on the evening of February 27, a devastating fire ravaged the Reichstag in Berlin. As Nazi chiefs started to gather at the scene, they immediately pointed the finger at the Communists the real culprit was a Dutch loner, perhaps aided by a covert team of SA arsonists. Adolf Hitler himself arrived in his limousine at around p. After he had stared for some time at the blazing building, he flew into one of his hysterical rages. Blinded by deep-seated paranoia of the Left and apparently ignorant about the possible involvement of some of his own menhe denounced the fire as the signal for a long-expected Communist revolt and ordered an immediate crackdown. According to one witness, he screamed: "There will be no mercy now. Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down. The Berlin police immediately swung into action, the German capital still bathed in darkness. Among the victims detained over the following hours were leading Communist politicians and other prominent suspects. Earlier that same night, in other parts of Berlin, the police had arrested Carl von Ossietzky, the famous pacifist publicist, and Hans Litten, a brilliant young left-wing attorney who had tangled Hitler in knots during a court appearance in Within hours, the police prison at Alexanderplatz held much of the liberal and left elite of Berlin. The arrest sheets read like a Who's Who of writers, artists, lawyers, and politicians despised by the KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.