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A review by shachargannot
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann
5.0
Unsurprisingly, this was an incredibly difficult book to read. I felt utterly helpless so often – especially during the middle third of the work for whatever reason. I was so excited to inch towards the end of the war until Wachsmann mentioned how the end of the war saw some of the highest death rates. It also doesn’t help that I now need to start on the next book that takes me back to the beginning of the war. As one professor in my department said, it’s like a never-ending Groundhog Day… in World War II.
Beginning with Dachau in 1945 and working backwards was an absolutely brilliant beginning to KL: A History of Nazi Concentration Camps. We see Dachau as we know it from allied photographs and survivor memoirs, and are taken back in history to see that this was not always the end goal. That, in accordance with Wachsmann’s argument, there was not a straight line from the establishment of the KL system to the mass extermination that we now know as the Holocaust.
Wachsmann’s use of individual stories was incredibly welcome, and I do not think you can – or at least should – tell the history of a genocide without direct testimony of its victims. The fact that there are so many stories we will never know is heart-wrenching (feels like a severe understatement just to write that word). The reliance on those that survived to tell the stories of those that perished is unfathomable, but also the only arsenal we have as historians.
Throughout the work, I had incredible whiplash. Oftentimes, Wachsmann would describe some act of incredible, violent sadism, only to write, “but such acts were an exception in the early days of the KL.” Or, later on, he would describe some act of kindness, and then say “this was the exception.” I understand the importance of shedding light on the different experiences that people had, even if they did not conform to the norm, but as a reader, these were incredibly disorienting.
There is certainly a lot more to say about KL, and a lot has indeed been said about it. I’ll wade slowly into these waters, because they are murky, dark and incredibly disturbing. Sometimes, I wonder why I chose postwar justice as my field of interest. After delving into the atrocities committed in the camp here, I am left wondering if I would ever be satisfied with what happens in a sanitized courtroom miles and sometimes decades later after the SS men and other Nazi leaders have had a chance to drink their schnapps and gaze dreamily at nature, thankful for their contribution to the almost total annihilation of a people.
Beginning with Dachau in 1945 and working backwards was an absolutely brilliant beginning to KL: A History of Nazi Concentration Camps. We see Dachau as we know it from allied photographs and survivor memoirs, and are taken back in history to see that this was not always the end goal. That, in accordance with Wachsmann’s argument, there was not a straight line from the establishment of the KL system to the mass extermination that we now know as the Holocaust.
Wachsmann’s use of individual stories was incredibly welcome, and I do not think you can – or at least should – tell the history of a genocide without direct testimony of its victims. The fact that there are so many stories we will never know is heart-wrenching (feels like a severe understatement just to write that word). The reliance on those that survived to tell the stories of those that perished is unfathomable, but also the only arsenal we have as historians.
Throughout the work, I had incredible whiplash. Oftentimes, Wachsmann would describe some act of incredible, violent sadism, only to write, “but such acts were an exception in the early days of the KL.” Or, later on, he would describe some act of kindness, and then say “this was the exception.” I understand the importance of shedding light on the different experiences that people had, even if they did not conform to the norm, but as a reader, these were incredibly disorienting.
There is certainly a lot more to say about KL, and a lot has indeed been said about it. I’ll wade slowly into these waters, because they are murky, dark and incredibly disturbing. Sometimes, I wonder why I chose postwar justice as my field of interest. After delving into the atrocities committed in the camp here, I am left wondering if I would ever be satisfied with what happens in a sanitized courtroom miles and sometimes decades later after the SS men and other Nazi leaders have had a chance to drink their schnapps and gaze dreamily at nature, thankful for their contribution to the almost total annihilation of a people.