Eugen Kogon

A well-known Christian opponent of the Nazi Party, Kogon was arrested more than once and spent six years at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Eugen Kogon was born in Munich, the son of an unmarried Russian-Jewish mother from Mykolaiv (a city then part of the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine).

Through his work, he made the acquaintance of sociologist Othmar Spann, who recommended him for the Zentralkommission der christlichen Gewerkschaften ("Central Committee of Christian Unions").

[citation needed] An avowed opponent of Nazism, Kogon was arrested by the Gestapo in 1936 and again in March 1937, charged with, among other things, "work[ing] for anti-national socialist forces outside the territory of the Reich".

[citation needed] At Buchenwald, Kogon spent part of his time working as a clerk for camp doctor Erwin Ding-Schuler, who headed up the typhus experimentation ward there.

Ding-Schuler saved Kogon's life at the end of the war by arranging to hide him in a crate, then smuggling him out of Buchenwald[6] to his own home in Weimar.

He worked as a volunteer historian for the United States Army at Camp King and began writing his book Der SS-Staat [de]: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager ("The SS-State: The System of the German Concentration Camps"), first published in 1946, which still stands as a basic reference on Nazi crimes.

They quickly reached a circulation of 75,000, which was very high for that time and, until 1984, remained one of the most influential socio-political and cultural magazines in the postwar era.

As a lesson from Nazism, Kogon early called for departure from a traditional nation-state and fought for the establishment of a European Republic.

Later, Kogon supported the Eastern policy of the Social-Liberal coalition and actively promoted reconciliation with Poland and the Soviet Union.