Dachau And The Nazi Terror 1933 1945

Through the author's restrained, precise style, combining personal memories and the researcher's scholarly detachment, the reader discovers the many facets of the camp: the hierarchical structure of the camp established and controlled by the SS, the categories of prisoners, their daily life, the arbitrary and escalating violence, the selections, the medical experiments and the role of the SS physicians, the intentional and programmed extermination, the camp's evacuation, the typhus epidemic, and liberation.

Weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazi regime established the first concentration camps in Germany. Initially used for real and suspected political enemies, the camps increasingly came under SS control and became sites for the repression of social outsiders and German Jews. Terror was central to the Nazi regime from the beginning, and the camps gradually moved toward the center of repression, torture, and mass murder during World War II and the Holocaust. This collection brings together revealing primary documents on the crucial origins of the Nazi concentration camp system in the prewar years between 1933 and 1939, which have been overlooked thus far. Many of the documents are unpublished and have been translated into English for the first time. These documents provide insight into the camps from multiple perspectives, including those of prisoners, Nazi officials, and foreign observers, and shed light on the complex relationship between terror, state, and society in the Third Reich.

Provides hundreds of entries and over 250 photographs of such Holocaust related topics as antisemitism, euthanasia, and mischlinge, including biographical information on such notorious figures as Adolph Hitler, Josef Mengele, and Amon Goeth.

The first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus 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 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 twentieth century.