By the spring of 1945, the Second World War was drawing to a close in Europe. Allied troops were sweeping through Nazi Germany and discovering the atrocities of SS concentration camps. The first to be reached intact was Buchenwald, in central Germany. American soldiers struggled to make sense of the shocking scenes they witnessed inside. They asked a small group of former inmates to draft a report on the camp. It was led by Eugen Kogon, a German political prisoner who had been an inmate since 1939. "The Theory and Practice of Hell" is his classic account of life inside.
Unlike many other books by survivors who published immediately after the war, "The Theory and Practice of Hell" is more than a personal account. It is a horrific examination of life and death inside a Nazi concentration camp, a brutal world of a state within state, and a society without law. But Kogon maintains a dispassionate and critical perspective. He tries to understand how the camp works, to uncover its structure and social organization. He knew that the book would shock some readers and provide others with gruesome fascination. But he firmly believed that he had to show the camp in honest, unflinching detail.
The result is a unique historical document--a complete picture of the society, morality, and politics that fueled the systematic torture of six million human beings. For many years, "The Theory and Practice of Hell" remained the seminal work on the concentration camps, particularly in Germany. Reissued with an introduction by Nikolaus Waschmann, a leading Holocaust scholar and author of Hilter's Prisons, this important work now demands to be re-read.

This is a new release of the original 1940 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

THE GERMANS Double History of a Nation BY EMIL LUDWIG Translated from the German by HEINZ and RUTH NORDEN Germany is nothing, but every individual German is much, and yet the Germans imagine the reverse to be true. Foreword HIS BOOK offers a history, not of Germany, but of the Germans. Here as in all his writings, the authors scope is psy chological. Even so, a complete story cannot be encompassed within the range of a single volume here too the artists skill lies in his selection. There are indifferent German emperors, whose names will not be found in the pages that follow for the purpose is not to tire the readers mind with as many names as possible, but to stimulate it with a smaller number of fully rounded characters. Battles and other external events resemble the zenith of a trajectory, whereas the real points of interest are where the projectile is fired and where it strikes cause and effect. On every one of the four hundred ninety-five pages that follow, it is the authors purpose to explain causes and effects of deeds and events explain them through the German character. The German way of feeling, the cruel schism within the German soul which has remained unchanged throughout the ages these are here to be developed, through two thousand years. There is no objective writing of history outside the encyclopedia. The present version, too, is conditioned by personal factors. Only the admission of this fact distinguishes it from others. In all lands certain professors strike rigid poses like the Supreme Judge on a Byzantine mosaic, and they often deceive their readers and them selves about the extent to which their own subjective destinies, fortunes and reverses influence theirwritings. An author who con ceals his own situation and that of the age in which he lives leads the reader astray and grows tedious in the bargain. This is true espe cially in times such as our own when violent partisanship sets men against each other. No historian, not even the great Plutarch, would have written exactly as he did, had he written a century vii Foreword darlierbf later Carlyle was deeply influenced by the French Revo lutioij, Jtkhardt by the age of Bismarck both were similarly in fluenced fc by deep-felt personal experiences, even when they wrote of distant times. The way in which one epoch mirrors itself in another is precisely what lends wings to author and reader. Since my twentieth year I have depicted the German character in a dozen dramas and biographies, from Ulrich von Hutten and Griinewald to Goethe, Beethoven, Weber and Wagner and from Emperor Frederic II and King Frederic the Great to Bismarck, William and Hindenburg always with reverence for the German spirit, but with censure for the German State. - This discrepancy be tween State and spirit distinguishes German history from that of all other nations. It always obscures the spirit precisely when the State flourishes and vice versgjThat is the subject of this new book, which seeks to go beyond the destiny of individual Germans to ex plain the character of the nation. It is a tragic and ironic spectacle, repeated throughout the centuries from Arminius to Hitler...

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!