Nikolaus Wachsmann

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Nikolaus Wachsmann (born 1971 in Munich ) is a German historian and university lecturer at Birkbeck College of the University of London . He researches the history of the National Socialist concentration camps and has received several awards for his work.

Life

Wachsmann completed his academic training in England, first at the London School of Economics , where he obtained a bachelor's degree, then at the University of Cambridge , where he completed his master's degree, and finally at the University of London , where he began his work “Between Reform and Repression: Imprisonment in Weimar Germany ”. He was a Research Fellow at Downing College, University of Cambridge and a lecturer at the University of Sheffield . In 2005 he was appointed to Birkbeck College . Today he works there as a professor and teaches modern European history. Most of his publications appear in English and only afterwards in German. Main research areas of Wachsmann are legal terror and the extermination policy of the National Socialists .

KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Wachsmann's main work, published in English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese in 2015 and in German in 2016, is a long-awaited, monumental story of the concentration camps from their improvised beginnings in 1933 to their sometimes hectic dissolution in 1945. It combines both perspective the perpetrator as well as that of the victims describes the monstrous dynamics of the extermination policy and at the same time gives the prisoners and the tortured a voice. For this purpose, he evaluated a number of original sources and the entire research literature, including diaries and letters from camp inmates, trial documents, SS and police files. Many of these documents are presented here for the first time. According to the blurb, quoted by Perlentaucher , he was able to “bring the practices of the perpetrators, the attitudes of society and the world of the victims together in a large epic framework, and was able to describe life and death in the camp, the individual fates, but also those political, economic and military circumstances, the background to the Nazi extermination policy. ”The author succeeds in combining both the close-up and the historical development into a haunting narrative.

The response to Wachsmann's main work was and is consistently enthusiastic and highly praised. Keith Kahn-Harris summarizes in the subtitle of his review in the London daily newspaper The Independent : "An extraordinary new study renders the unimaginable evil of the camps relatable". [An extraordinary new study makes the unimaginable evil of the concentration camp understandable.] The writer and literary critic Paul Ingendaay celebrates the work on a full page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a masterful historical narrative and a lasting standard historical work.

British historian Ian Kershaw praises the historical work as one that "will hardly ever be surpassed". Wachsmann's colleague at Birkbeck College, Joanna Bourke , agrees with this judgment when she describes his storytelling technique and emphasizes it as unusual. In his narrative, the author begins with what we think we know and then, in a series of steps, condenses the picture in all of its complexity. According to Bourke, Wachsmann has an obsession for accuracy, he insists on precise information on places and times. In the opening pages of the book he describes in detail how US troops came to Dachau in the early afternoon of April 2, 1945 and were shocked to find thousands dead on bare ground and 32,000 prisoners, more dead than alive. Then he describes the situation in the same concentration camp on August 31, 1939, the day before the world war. The barracks were clean, the beds properly made. Forced labor and arbitrariness were routine, but violence was regulated to a high degree. Relatively few inmates died at that time. Finally a step back six years. He describes how the concentration camp was set up in an unused ammunition factory on March 22, 1933. Most of the inmates were deported and arrested for political reasons; the majority were communists . They wore their own clothes and were relatively well fed. Their guards were not brutal SS thugs, but ordinary police officers.

Wachsmann strictly rejects generalizations and historians who generalize. He insists that there is no such thing as a “typical” prisoner or kapo , not even a “typical” guard. He insists on the specifics of time and place. The historian also questions the automatic association between Jews and concentration camps, since - depending on the year - only 10 to 30 percent of KL inmates were Jews. And yet, according to Wachsmann, the Jews were overrepresented in the camps, with a population of just one percent. Most of the six million Holocaust victims were not murdered in the concentration camps, but in fields, pits, gas vans and the Birkenau , Treblinka , Chelmno , Sobibor and Belzec death camps .

Despite countless literature about the Nazi era, according to Paul Ingendaay, no historian has ever bundled all of the knowledge about the camps. The book is very clearly divided into large chapters and sub-chapters, which in turn are broken down into short chapters of around eight pages. This ensures that the reader always has an overview. As Wachsmann repeatedly describes individual fates in addition to the big picture and describes the different reactions of prisoners and guards to the horror, the reader learns about the fate in the context of guilt, which was particularly successful using the example of the Kapos. “If other inmates saw them as willing tools of the SS,” writes Wachsmann, “they had little choice but to increase their abuse if they did not want to lose the life-saving protection of the SS.” The case history of Karl Kapp , one Ingendaay sees the former SPD city ​​councilor, who as a Kapo became a flayer, but also kept the SS at bay, as a lesson: "The camps forced everyone into a gray zone in which earlier concepts of good and bad became relative."

Wachsmann is of German origin, but studied in Great Britain and has taught there for twenty years. That is why, according to Ingendaay, his book is completely connected to the Anglo-Saxon school, which is interested in structures without forgetting the victims. The style is also exemplary: “without tremolo or pathos”. The only way to understand the Holocaust is to take an integrative approach to historical studies that takes into account the perspectives of all those involved and the framework conditions. Every single phase of the Holocaust must be viewed in a differentiated manner. And only in this way, Bourke concludes in her analysis of the book, can hope arise of answering the question posed by the survivor Moritz Choinowski : "Is it possible?"

Wachsmann's most important awards come from renowned representatives of his guild, the Wiener Library , the Royal Historical Society and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism . He is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the German History Society , he is also involved in the publication of two scientific periodicals, the European History Quarterly and the Central European History .

Fonts (selection)

author
  • Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany , New Haven: Yale University Press 2004
    • Trapped under Hitler . Justice terror and the execution of sentences in the Nazi state. Munich: Siedler, 2006
  • KL - A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-374-11825-9 .
    • KL - The History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps, Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-88680-827-4 .
editor
  • Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories , ed. together with Jane Caplan , London 2010
  • Before the Holocaust: New Approaches to the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-1939 , special issue of Journal of Contemporary History 45 (2010), No. 3, ed. together with Christian Goeschel
  • The Nazi concentration camps 1933 - 1939, A Documentary History , ed. together with Christian Goeschel, Lincoln, Neb.; Univ. of Nebraska Press, London 2012, ISBN 978-0-8032-2782-8 .
  • The left in sight. On the establishment of the concentration camps in 1933 , ed. together with Sybille Steinbacher , Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1494-8 .
  • Rewriting German History, New Perspectives on Modern Germany , ed. together with Jan Rüger , Palgrave Macmillan UK, Basingstoke 2015, ISBN 978-1-3495-7150-5 .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Perlentaucher : Nikolaus Wachsmann: KL - The History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , accessed on May 5, 2016.
  2. ↑ Keith Kahn-Harris: KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann, book review , The Independent (London), August 9, 2015, accessed May 5, 2016
  3. ↑ a b c Paul Ingendaay (Liverpool): And think about what you suffered , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 22, 2016, accessed on May 5, 2016.
  4. ↑ Jonathan Kirsch: [An extensive history of the Holocaust] , Jewish Journal (Los Angeles), April 9, 2015, accessed May 5, 2016.
  5. ↑ a b c Joanna Bourke : What we don't know about the Holocaust , New Statesman (London), September 24, 2015, accessed May 5, 2016.
  6. ^ Adam Kirsch: The System - Two new histories show how the Nazi concentration camps worked. , The New Yorker (New York), April 6, 2016, accessed May 6, 2016.
  7. ^ Wiener Library : Fraenkel Prize: Previous Winners , accessed on May 5, 2016.
  8. ^ Professor Nikolaus Wachsmann. Birkbeck College. Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  9. ^ Ben Fisher: Nikolaus Wachsmann Wins Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize . Jewish Quarterly. March 14, 2016.
  10. ^ Susan Southard, Nikolaus Wachsmann and Steve Luxenberg Named Winners of the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards .
personal data
SURNAME Wachsmann, Nikolaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and university teacher
DATE OF BIRTH 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich