Contenidos : Prologue


1. Early Camps

A Bloody Spring and Summer

Coordination

Open Terror


2. The SS Camp System

A Permanent Exception

The Camp SS

Prisoner Worlds


3. Expansion

Social Outsiders

Forced Labor

Jews


4. War

The Camp SS at War

Road to Perdition

Scales of Suffering


5. Mass Extermination

Killing the Weak

Executing Soviet POWs

Murderous Utopias


6. Holocaust

Auschwitz and the Nazi Final Solution

Factories of Death

Genocide and the KL System


7. Anus Mundi

Jewish Prisoners in the East

SS Routines

Plunder and Corruption


8. Economics and Extermination

Oswald Pohl and the WVHA

Slave Labor

“Guinea Pigs”


9. Camps Unbound

In Extremis

Satellite Camps

The Outside World


10. Impossible Choices

Coerced Communities

Kapos

Defiance


11. Death or Freedom

The Beginning of the End

Apocalypse

The Final Weeks


Epilogue

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.