a history of the Nazi concentration camps Wachsmann, Nikolaus Daniel 1971- creator text nyu New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016 First paperback edition monographic eng 865 pages, 32 unnumbered plates : illustrations, maps ; 21 cm Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. 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.' 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. Early camps. A bloody spring and summer ; Coordination ; Open terror The SS camp system. A permanent exception ; The Camp SS ; Prisoner worlds Expansion. Social outsiders ; Forced labor ; Jews War. The Camp SS at war ; Road to perdition ; Scales of suffering Mass extermination. Killing the weak ; Executing Soviet POWs ; Murderous utopias Holocaust. Auschwitz and the Nazi final solution ; Factories of death ; Genocide and the KL system Anus mundi. Jewish prisoners in the East ; SS routines ; Plunder and corruption Economics and extermination. Oswald Pohl and the WVHA ; Slave labor ; "Guinea pigs" Camps unbound. In extremis ; Satellite camps ; The outside world Impossible choices. Coerced communities ; Kapos ; Defiance Death or freedom. The beginning of the end ; Apocalypse ; The final weeks Nikolaus Wachsmann. Includes bibliographical references (pages 779-826) and index. Holocausto judío (1939-1945) Guerra Mundial II, 1939-1945 Campos de concentración Alemania Guerra Mundial II, 1939-1945 Prisioneros y prisiones Alemania Guerra Mundial II, 1939-1945 Atrocidades Alemania D 804.3 W114k 2016 9780374535926 (pbk.) 0374535922 (pbk.) 251204 20260422121034.0 eng