An 863-page history of the Nazi concentration camps has won this year’s prestigious JQ-Wingate Literary Prize.

Nikolaus Wachsmann won the honour for his sweeping study KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.

The professor of modern European history at Birkbeck College, in London, beat competition from authors including Zachary Leader, Dan Stone and Howard Jacobson to claim the £4,000 prize.

Head of the judging panel, writer Samantha Ellis, commended Prof Wachsmann’s book as “a work of immense scholarship and of vivid humanity”.

She added: “Nikolaus Wachsmann marshals many new primary sources, and thousands of individual testimonies, showing how the camps were used against many different people, from political opponents of the regime to those considered racially unfit.

“This is a book we think should be read, and re-read, and a book we know we will be coming back to for years to come.”

Her fellow judges, columnist Hugo Rifkind, Granta Top 20 Young Novelist Tahmima Anam and head of Masorti Judaism Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg celebrated the work as “an incredible achievement”.

Prof Wachsmann said he was “greatly honoured” to receive the prize, which is given annually to authors judged to have best translated the idea of Jewishness to their audiences.

When writing the book, he said he “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 understand the tragic world of the Nazi camps a little clearer.”