The Theory and Practice of Hell (4 page)

Buchenwald was the first big concentration camp to fall into the hands of the western allies intact. It was to serve as the key to an understanding of the system behind the con centration camps as a whole.

Under the direction of Lieutenant Albert G. Rosenberg, the members of the team, Max M. Kimental, Richard Akselrad,

Alfred H. Sampson and Ernest S. Biberfeld, began to lay the groundwork for an objective and conclusive report. Their own work in helping to dissolve the camp quickly made them realize that it was quite impossible for outsiders to gain even an approximately accurate picture of the complex situation within the camp and to evaluate its true significance. Such a task could be carried out only in close collaboration with a few reliable camp inmates who had no axe to grind. Kogon was asked to take over this job.

The initial report was completed in Weimar within about a month. Constant liaison was maintained with the camp and the numerous groups of former prisoners, and rather for midable difficulties had to be overcome, as will become evident from many of the chapters in this book. The first report comprised some 400 typewritten pages, single-spaced. There was a main report of 125 pages which Kogon himself had dictated, and approximately 150 statements from in dividual prisoners who, by virtue of their experience, had been asked to give their views on various facts, incidents, per sons and phases. Kogon’s chief collaborators were the Socialist writer Ferdinand Romhild; Heinz Baumeister of Dortmund, a Social Democrat; and Stefan Heymann, an or thodox Communist editor with whom Kogon was on excellent terms, although Heymann had been detailed by the Com munist leadership in camp to serve as a check on him.

Kogon consulted further with Dr. Werner Hilpert, former leader of the Catholic Action in Saxony and chairman of the Catholic Center party in Saxony, as well as with the radical leftist writer Franz Hackel. Except for Stefan Heymann, Kogon had long been on terms of close friendship with all these men. Each of them had wide experience in camp, their minimum term of detention being five years. They had “ come up from below.” Under circumstances that were often very difficult they had slowly risen to positions that afforded them insight and influence. Both had always involved danger, especially since none of these men belonged to the “ big shot” group in camp. None of them was soiled by corruption or other camp misdeeds.

To dispel certain apprehensions that the report might become a kind of indictment of leading camp inmates, Kogon read all but two of the twelve chapters—all that was finished

at the time—to a group of fifteen men early in May 1945. All fifteen had been leaders of the camp underground, or were representative of certain groups of political prisoners. Their verdict was that the contents of the report were objective and accurate.

Meanwhile the Austrian engineer Gustav Wagerer (today

editor-in-chief of Vienna’s Communist daily), a good friend of Kogon’s to whom he and many other non-Communist comrades owe much, had begun to compose a kind of Buchenwald chronicle, for which he likewise solicited special contributions. Kogan and he exchanged carbon copies of im portant records of this nature. In addition, Stefan Heymann, with the full approval of Kogon, furnished the camp in formation office with a copy of every record that came before him for editing.

Thus occasional passages from the wealth of material (such as the stories of the German Air Force experiments on Dachau inmates, of certain incidents that occurred in the camp prisons, etc.) have appeared word for word, although with source unacknowledged, in a pamphlet entitled
KL BU
(the German abbreviation for Buchenwald concentration camp) which has been published in the Russian Zone of Occupation.

One copy each of the finished report was transmitted by way of the Rosenberg Intelligence Team to the Psychological Warfare Division, SHAEF, Paris, and the headquarters of the Twelfth United States Army Group at Bad Nauheim. Sub sequently this material repeatedly served as a basis for in vestigations by the War Crimes Commission at Nuremberg and Wiesbaden, and by the Military Intelligence Service Cen ter of the United States Forces, European Theater.

Mr. Crossman of Oxford, today a Labor party member of the British House of Commons, at the time working for the British Broadcasting Corporation with the Psychological Warfare Division in Paris, was the first to recommend that the report, which was addressed to an official agency rather than to the public, be reworked into a book. The chief of the Psychological Warfare Division, later to become the In formation Control Division, Brigadier-General Robert A. McClure, agreed to the proposal, and upon returning from Paris Kogon went to work.

The present book is a new manuscript, although here and

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INTRODUCTION •
Xlll

there sections of the original text have been used. Instead of Buchenwald as an individual case, the system of the German concentration camps is set forth as a whole. The style has been sharply modified. Important new documentary material has been added. The earlier individual reports written at Kogon’s suggestion have all been carefully and critically worked over. In a few outstanding cases they have been quoted verbatim. In other cases, when he felt justified in assuming the respon sibility for doing so, Kogon has used them as sources for the narrative. At no point is there any conflict between the earlier report and the present book.

In his introduction, Kogon expresses sincere gratitude to all his friends who encouraged, advised and helped him whenever the task bogged down, some of them even financially. He thanks, in particular, his friends Walter Dirks of Frankfurt-on-Main and Hermann Friihauf, M.D., of Offenbach; also the City of Oberursel, under its former and present mayors, which generously offered to him and his family a new home, where he was able to work. And on the American side, he thanks Captain Albert G.Rosenberg (now of New York City), Captain Daniel Lerner (of the same city), Mr. Richard Akselrad (Fulda), Captain Richard Gutman (Military In telligence Service Center, Oberursel), and Mr. H. H. Blake (now of Boston).

Yet Kogon alone answers for the book. None of these gen tlemen shares any part of the responsibility for it. Nor is it associated with any German or foreign propaganda agency, nor with any party or other office or other person.

The book was written between June 15 and December 15, 1945. In the second German edition, of which the American edition is a translation, the text was in places condensed, and in places cut, and in certain sections expanded. Its sense, however, was not altered. Some factual corrections of minor details proved necessary as Kogon had prophesied in the preface to the first edition they would be. But the core of the narrative remains the same, and is neither a history of the German concentration camps nor a compendium of all the atrocities that were committed. It is, as it was intended to be, primarily a sociological study and its verified contents can, as its author says, claim outstanding significance from a human, political and moral aspect.

xiv
INTRODUCTION

By its very nature, this is not a pretty book. Yet the mirror that it holds up to mankind reflects no nameless monsters. The image in the glass is familiar. There, but for the grace of God, go you and 1. It is a pageant of horror to make even the sturdiest blench. Indeed, it may so deeply shock even upright men and women that they will be tempted to put the book aside. But its author could not allow this contingency to temper his account of human—and German—depravity. The entanglements of collective guilt are too sinister. They reach far beyond the borders of Germany. They enmesh even those who can honestly claim ignorance.

National Socialism has left behind in the world a foul heritage of arrogance, violence, arbitrary power and hate. Even while the battle was still on, the victors were inexorably dragged down to the level of the enemy. Since the liberation there have been “ Christian Soldiers” —the exception, hap pily, rather than the rule—who were easily the match of the SS, and not in battle alone. Below a news picture of the bat tered skeleton of a Japanese bus, crushed by the atomic bomb, runs the caption: “ They found a swift way to join their ancestors.” “ I am not persuaded,” observes Kogon, “ that this does credit to the better world, the world that won vic tory. But I take heart from the fact that I am permitted to say this, that the world does not turn a deaf ear.”

The voluminous concentration-camp literature of the past twelve years, the profuse propaganda engaged in by press and radio when some of the camps had been liberated—all this was virtually straight atrocity-reporting. As a result, no one seems to know even now
what a German concentration camp was really like
.

It was a world unto itself, a state within a state, a society without law. Men were flung into it to fight for their naked lives, for mere survival. They fought with all the virtues and vices at their command—and usually there was more vice than virtue. Was the SS alone the enemy? Far from it. Inmate fought fellow inmate with the same tenacity, if not even more bitterly! Traditional behavior patterns were utterly disrupted, moral values strained to the bursting point. The human tragedy ran its full gamut.

The despair of those compelled to recognize to what extent