The Theory and Practice of Hell (3 page)

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Publishers' Introduction to the American Edition
1

Dr. Eugen Kogon was born on February 2, 1903, in Munich. After graduating from a humanistic
Gymnasium
, he studied economics and sociology at the Universities of Munich, Florence and Vienna. Until early 1934 he lived in Austria, a writer and editor, and later a trustee of a private trust com pany whose operations extended over several countries. He took advantage of repeated trips in Germany, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria to engage in intensive anti-Nazi activities, in the course of which he was twice arrested for brief periods in 1937. Immediately after the Germans marched into Austria, during the very night of March 11 to 12, 1938, he was finally arrested as one of the first opponents of the regime. Without possibility of court proceedings he spent eighteen months as a prisoner of the Gestapo.

In September 1939, he was taken to the Buchenwald con centration camp where he was at first a common laborer, then a blacksmith; after the fall of 1940, a tailor’s assistant. For

1 Based on the introductory material to the first and second German editions.

ix

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INTRODUCTION

two months in the spring of 1943 he was clerk in the “ Pathology Section.” During these weeks three different or ders from the Reich Main Security Office were received, assigning him to Auschwitz for death in the gas chamber. With the aid of a few influential friends in the camp it proved possible to delay his shipment three times. On June 6, 1943, Kogon voluntarily and with the approval of his comrades assumed the position of so-called “ First Medical Clerk” in Building 50 (Institute of Hygiene, Division for Serum Produc tion), under SS Major Ding-Schuler, who was at the same time chief of the laboratory where human experiments were conducted. By circuitous means a teletype message from the Reich Main Security Office was effected which ordered Kogon's “ liquidation” postponed until the end of the war.

Following Buchenwald’s liberation on April 11, 1945, Dr. Kogon settled, after seven years in prison camp, near Frankfurt-on-Main with his wife, his two sons and his daughter. Since April 1946, together with his friends Walter Dirks and Clement Munster, he has been publisher and editor of a literary and political monthly, the
Frankfurter Hefte.

2

On April 16, 1945, five days after the first American armored units had arrived, an Intelligence Team from the Psychological Warfare Division visited the Buchenwald con centration camp. Its mission was to study the situation and to prepare a comprehensive report for Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). The report was to show how a German concentration camp was organized, what role was assigned to it in the Nazi State and what happened to those who were sent to the camps by the Gestapo and detained there by the SS.