A review by zezozose_zadfrack_glutz
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann

5.0

If there is a more totalizing account of the Holocaust and its origins, I'm not sure I would need to read it after this. This is unceasingly real and blunt about the means of carrying out the organized genocide of millions of people over more than a decade. It dives head first into the most complex aspects of how people are affected by the implementation of fascism and how cynical the product of that process is. After reading this I simply do not see any limit to the depths that people can come to. Particularly disturbing was the portrayal of selfish human instincts overcoming some "ideal" notion of solidarity under misery. This book explodes Hollywood versions of the Holocaust and serves up a much truer representation of misery begetting misery, people setting up hierarchies even within the very bottom rung of a much larger hierarchy. The mechanization of genocide into a dispassionate psychological experiment. Truly bleak stuff.