—Mr. Snyder is the Housum professor of history at Yale University. His “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” will be published in September.
‘In popular memory,’ writes Nikolaus Wachsmann, “the concentration camps, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust have merged into one.” In our confusion, we have narrowed the horror of Nazi practice. Auschwitz was both a concentration camp and a killing site for Jews, which was unusual. If we recall Auschwitz and forget the other camps, we neglect the people who were concentrated in them, most of whom were not Jews. When we identify Auschwitz with the Holocaust, we neglect the other death factories dedicated to the extermination of Jews, places where more Jews were gassed than at Auschwitz, and omit the shooting pits, where more Jews were murdered than at Auschwitz. Auschwitz is simply the place where in 1942 the history of the concentration camps met the generally distinct history of the mass murder of Jews.
“KL” is a definitive history of the German concentration-camp system. (The title is the German abbreviation of the word for concentration camp, Konzentrationslager.) Mr. Wachsmann, a German historian who teaches at Birkbeck College, London, gently disassembles popular memory and draws a complete and convincing picture. He begins with the numerous improvised camps that the two paramilitary wings of the Nazi Party, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or “storm battalion”) and the SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”) established in the weeks after Hitler rose to power in early 1933. These were often tiny holding cells, sometimes in basements or warehouses. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, established a larger facility at Dachau; this would be the only camp that existed from the beginning of Nazi power to the end. The camps were about the consolidation of power and then about its allocation. The first victims were communists and socialists, people who might have challenged Hitler. In 1934, after the SS decapitated the rival SA in the “Night of the Long Knives,” it sealed its victory by taking complete control of the camps.