"Wachsmann offers an ... 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'"-- Amazon.com.

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.