KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

By: Nikolaus Wachsmann

Narrated by: Paul Hodgson

In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. 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 seen before.

A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the 20th century. Many books have explored the general history of the Holocaust and the Nazis, or anatomized individual concentration camps. But there has, surprisingly, never been a comprehensive history of the camps that integrates the stories of both the broad development of the system and daily life in the camps. In KL (the widely used acronym for konzentrationslager, German for concentration camps), Wachsmann offers an unprecedented account of the development of the camps, similar in scope and approach to Anne Applebaum's best-selling and award-winning Gulag: A History (2003). We will publish on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of most of the camps in April 1945.

Wachsmann is the first to synthesize a new generation of original scholarship on the camps, much of it only available in German and little-known in the English-speaking world. And he has unearthed a wide range of new documents, offering startling new revelations about the history of the camps.

©2015 Original Material by Nikolaus Wachsmann (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Nikolaus Wachsmann has written an admirable historical overview of the Nazi concentration camps, effectively combining decades of recent scholarship with his own original research. He captures both the trajectory of dynamic change through which the camp system evolved as well as the experiences and agency - however limited - of the prisoner community. This is an impressive and valuable book." (Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

"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)

Excellent, but...

Any additional comments?

The book is excellent, and the narrator does a very good job with the text (although his delivery is perhaps a bit fast), but the accents he uses when reading quotations are very distracting. I found it a very strange choice to read the quotations in the speakers' native accents, not all of which the narrator can do very well, and it detracted from the overall content for me. However, the book is outstanding, and I would still recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

Facinating.

This book provides an in depth history taking you back in time to Nazi Germany. It isn't chronological, but it helps one to understand the development of concentration camps of that period in human history. I thought it was an amazing compliment to other books I've read on the European theatre of World War ll.

Superb!

Very detailed history of KL. I have listened to several other books about Nazi Germany and WWII; this book provides a detailed look into history of concentration camps.

My only negative comment is about the narration and doing the accent for different nationalities. For example, quotes from Hitler are read in a strange German accent which honestly just sounded ridiculous but you get over them.

Excellent content but very poorly read accents. accents.

Outstanding content but very poorly read accents, non-English words are read terribly. Still a very good book

A grim but compelling read

I thought I had a grasp of this subject but Wachsmann’s deep and unrelenting tour through the entire history of the concentration camp system was a revelation. Put aside your preconceptions—he shows us the modest origins, the slow, creeping erosion of every hard-won modern social norm, the inversion of morals for the “good” of the nation, and the degree to which people accepted (indeed, approved of) what was being done to others.
He preserves and highlights hundreds of individual stories while showing the vast scope of the KL system, the myriad ways it functioned, and the many groups that were consigned to it.
But if, like me, you find yourself hanging on through the final chapters, hoping for some resolution—retribution, a lesson learned, a “never again” moment—alas, Professor Wachsmann’s history offers no such guarantees. One of the most revelatory lessons from this book is that, for the most part, punishment for these crimes was unevenly and inadequately delivered. Those responsible seemed, for the most part, to have gone to their graves still believing they were part of a worthy enterprise, and the societies within which the KLs existed distorted the story of the camps to their own political purposes.
But histories like this (and Timothy Snyder’s “Black Earth”) can give us a a better idea of what horror looks like in its nascent forms, before it becomes an irresistible force that compels nearly all to its will.