Revue de presse de l'Histoire - La Seconde guerre mondiale le cinéma les acteurs et les actrices de l'époque - les périodes de conflits mondiales viètnamm corée indochine algérie, journalistes, et acteurs des médias
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The result is a unique historical document—a complete picture of the society, morality, and politics that fueled the systematic torture of six million human beings.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.
Author : Eugen Kogon, Nikolaus Wachsmann (Introduction), Heinz Norden (Translator)
ISBN-13: 9780374529925
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 19/09/2006
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
"The best of the many books on Nazi concentrations camps and the society behind them." —C. Wright Mills
"Kogon omits nothing and spares no one. His account, magnificently controlled and dispassionate . . . achieves a
devastating impact." —The Nation
"A description of the closest thing to hell in human history." —Reinhold Niebuhr
Meet the Author
Nikolaus Wachsmann is a professor of Modern German History at the University of London and the author of Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany.
Dr. Eugen Kogon was a political prisoner at Buchenwald from September 1939 to April 1945. After the war, he wrote
"The Theory and Practice of Hell."