Author: Eugen Kogon

Eugen Kogon was a Catholic journalist in Vienna who wrote against the movement that took power in Germany, was arrested repeatedly for it, and spent six years inside Buchenwald from 1939. When American troops reached the camp in April 1945 they asked a group of surviving prisoners to set down how it had worked; Kogon led that group, and the report became Der SS-Staat, published in 1946 and translated as The Theory and Practice of Hell. It is not a memoir. It sets out the camp system as an administrative machine: the ranks, the paperwork, the economics of prisoner labour, the hierarchy the inmates themselves were forced into, and the psychology of the men who ran it. He wrote it within a year of getting out and kept his own experience largely outside the frame. It sold half a million copies and went into eight languages. Kogon co-founded the Frankfurter Hefte and later held a chair in political science at Darmstadt. He lived from 1903 to 1987.