Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is unlikely to be surpassed. It documents for the first time the complete and comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp system from 1933-1945. In the process it clears up some misunderstood beliefs and showcases how the Nazi march toward the Holocaust was based on a continuum rather than an overnight momentous decision. Wachsmann demonstrates how the first concentration camps - ramshackle holding cells really - were set up in 1933 after Hitler came to power. The purpose of these camps was to intimidate and silence all kinds of opponents, from vagabonds and Communists to drunks and Jews. Targeting only Jews was not the purpose of these camps. The camps subsided for a few years after 1933 but were rekindled in the late 30s after Hitler, Himmler and others set their plan for a 'Master Order' based on race in effect. Jews, gypsies and homosexuals started to be specifically targeted after 1938, although even then until 1941 or so the main plan was intimidation, financial extortion and forced migration. It was only in 1942 that the plan turned toward extermination; the Wannsee conference was an important touchstone (although again not the most important or the only one). But even here, the methods for extermination were based on older ones. Killing by gas was a legacy of the horrific T-4 euthanasia program of the 30s. Wachsmann also reminds us that the Holocaust did not suddenly start with the gas chambers but was initiated by the SS Einsatzgruppen killing squads in the Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Also, the first casualties of many of the camps were not Jews but Soviet POWs. Another book that details this background very well is Richard Rhodes's "Masters of Death". The book also demolishes some myths. One myth of course is the belief that the Holocaust somehow sprang fully from someone's head or signature or from a single conference in 1942. As the book demonstrates, this is not true and the whole program grew out of an escalation of historical acts from the 1930s onwards, sometimes through accidents and fits and starts. The other myth the book addresses is of Auschwitz somehow being the most gruesome emblematic symbol of the Holocaust. As terrible as Auschwitz was, the book makes it clear that unlike Auschwitz, four other camps (Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno) were dedicated exclusively to extermination. Auschwitz was also a labor camp; this fact was valuable because it allowed many survivors to escape and tell their stories. However an unintended side effect of their unforgettable testimony is the belief that Auschwitz stood for everything the Holocaust stood for. As the book documents in great detail, reality was more complicated. Wachsmann talks about all of this as well as the mind numbing bureaucracy that permeates even an unimaginable atrocity like the Holocaust at great length. Yet the prose in this 800 page volume is remarkably readable, partly because somehow Wachsmann still finds space to focus on individual personalities, from the infamous to the mundane. He never lets us forget that the Holocaust was perpetrated by many ordinary people, from high Nazi officials to lowly camp personnel and random citizens of occupied territories, and this remains perhaps the most disturbing fact of all. This is quite definitely the most panoramic, nuanced and authoritative view published until now, not just of the camps per se but of their historical evolution. Painful and gut-wrenching to read in many places, but a necessary and very valuable contribution even to the mountain of literature that exists about the Third Reich.