Concentration camps in Nazi Germany : the new histories /

Caplan (Oxford) and Wachsmann (Birkbeck College, London) present a digest of recent historiography on the Nazi concentration camps. The emergence of historicized studies on the camps, including the recent appearance of two multivolume, site-by-site encyclopedias in German and English (e.g., The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Concentration Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, CH, Nov'09, 47-1220) present researchers with a wealth of detail at the expense of synthesis. The nine essays by leading historians in this volume seek to remedy that gap with reviews of recent scholarly literature on various dimensions of the Nazi concentration camps: their history (Wachsmann); camp personnel (Karin Orth); social history (Falk Pingel); gender (Caplan); public interaction with and knowledge of the camps (Karola Fings); forced labor (Jens-Christian Wagner); the camps' intersection with the Holocaust (Dieter Pohl); the death marches (Daniel Blatman); and the camps' postwar histories (Harold Marcuse). Caplan's call for a gendered analysis of camp perpetrators and prisoners, Fings's evaluation of the camps' "public face," Blatman's analysis of death march perpetrators, and Marcuse's tracing of the camps' postwar development are little-studied aspects of the concentration camps that make this volume especially welcome. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. R. White University of Maryland University College