Nikolaus Wachsmann wins Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize
First comprehensive history of Nazi concentration camps wins prestigious annual accolade
Birkbeck professor of Modern History, Nikolaus Wachsmann, has won this year’s Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize for his book, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.
Professor Wachsmann, who is a lecturer within the College’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, was selected for the annual literary prize, the only of its kind in the UK which attracts nominations from all over the globe. This is the latest in a number of accolades for the book, including its selection as the Wall Street Journal’s Best Book of 2015 and the Kirkus Reviews’ Best History Book 2015.
KL – the Nazi abbreviation of Konzentrationslager – is a unique and comprehensive chronicle of the concentration camps, spanning the 12 years of the Third Reich. Combining the political and the personal, the 863-page book examines the organisation of such an immense genocidal machine, while drawing a vivid picture of life inside the camps for the individual prisoner.
Judges of this year’s Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize described KL as ‘an incredible achievement, one of those rare books you know people will still be consulting a generation from now’.
In an interview published this week in the Jewish Quarterly, Chair of judges Samantha Ellis said: “It is a work of immense scholarship and of vivid humanity, as Nikolaus Wachsmann marshals many new primary sources, and thousands of individual testimonies, showing how the concentration camps were used against many different people, from political opponents of the regime to those considered racially unfit.”
In response, Professor Wachsmann said he was “greatly honoured to accept this prize”.
He said: “When writing this history of the Nazi concentration camps, I kept thinking about a message buried by a Jewish victim near the Auschwitz crematorium: ‘may the world at least behold a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived’. I hope my book makes a small contribution to this endeavour, to help us see and understand the tragic world of the Nazi camps a little clearer.”
Dr Fred Anscombe, Head of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck said: “I applaud and congratulate Nikolaus Wachsmann on winning the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize. We in the department have long valued Nik's exceptional skill in research and teaching about the Nazi period, and we are absolutely delighted to see him win this much wider public recognition of excellence.”
Established in 1977, the annual JQ Wingate prize worth £4000 is awarded to the best book – fiction or non-fiction – of Jewish interest for the general reader. On the short-list alongside KL this year, were Ishmael’s Oranges by Claire Hajaj; J by Howard Jacobson; The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader; Between Gods by Alison Pick; The Impossible Exile by George Prochnik and The Liberation of the Camps by Dan Ston
Find out more
- Courses in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
- Professor Nikolaus Wachsmann
- KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps