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“Night and Fog: Documentation from Five Years of Protective Custody” - documentation of the horrors of the Sachsenhausen camp by a prisoner who was held there for five consecutive years. Munich, 1946 - First edition - NACHT UND NEBEL. Aufzeichnungen aus fünf Jahren Schutzhaft - “Night and Fog: Documentation from Five Years of Protective Custody, ” by Arnold Weiss-Rüthel - a German journalist and writer who was persecuted by the Nazi regime. Published by Herbert Kluger, “Published under Information Control License of the Military Government No. USE-163.” Munich, 1946 - First edition. The book was written by Arnold Weiss-Rüthel, prisoner number 18710 in the Sachsenhausen camp, a German journalist and writer who was persecuted by the Nazi regime - a personal testimony on the persecution of opponents of the Nazi regime and the mechanism of the Nazi concentration camps. Between the years 1934 - 1938 Arnold was the editor of the widely circulated Munich weekly “Jugend, ” founded by Georg Hirth. Already from the early 1930s he was persecuted by the Nazis due to his involvement in various publications that did not align with the spirit of the party; he was also suspected in their eyes as a “supporter of Jews” after publishing in his journal articles written by Jewish authors. With the strengthening of the Nazi Party’s power, Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda followed him personally, and even sent him a “warning, ” but in response he was not deterred and continued to publish in his newspaper along a line opposing the Nazi spirit. Arnold was arrested by the Gestapo on March 12, 1940, in Munich. At the bottom of the title page appears a quotation of the charge from the arrest form on the basis of which Arnold was arrested by the Gestapo: “Diary entries and handwritten notes of the ‘Volkswirt’ express contempt for nationalism and for members of the Reich government, and reveal his anti-state attitude aimed at undermining nationalism, and, in view of his negative stance, give reason for concern that he may act against the interests of the German Reich, especially during the war, if released prematurely.” In addition, he was accused of being the distributor of several anti-fascist pamphlets, and of further offenses such as the absurd charge that in 1929 (!) four years before Hitler’s rise to power, he donated 50 German Reichspfennig to the “Iron Front anti-fascist organization.” He understood that the situation might worsen and sought escape routes, but at that time (March 1940) all routes of emigration out of Germany were closed. Arnold was captured, and after about a month in detention and interrogations under Gestapo torture, he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen camp. “It was once said that murder cannot be organized, and that it will always remain an isolated event. The concentration camps, scenes of blood and terror, prove the horrifying error of this belief, ” he writes. From this point, he unfolds in meticulous detail what he experienced in the camp. During the period of approximately five years in which he was held there, more than 200,000 prisoners were confined in it - political opponents, Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, and others, and many of them perished from starvation, forced labor, and executions. Within the camp operated the execution facility Station Z, where prisoners were shot in the back of the neck inside a camouflaged installation that appeared ostensibly as a medical measuring station. Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were led there in 1941–1942 and shot one after another with a bullet to the back of the neck. Many prisoners were sent to hard forced labor under lethal conditions. On the shoe-testing track, Schuhprüfstrecke, prisoners were forced to march dozens of kilometers a day over different surfaces in order to test equipment for the German army; many collapsed and died from exhaustion. The prisoners suffered from deliberate starvation and beatings, and medical experiments and public executions were part of the routine. Arnold describes in detail the structure of the camp, the various locations of the commandant’s offices, the block commanders, the offices of the mail censorship department, the registration rooms, the guard towers, the roll-call square, and the other sections of the camp. “There was hardly an office in which some banal declaration of Adolf Hitler or one of the philosophers of his party was not displayed on the wall, ” he writes. In his book, he recounts countless instances of humiliation, beatings, and murders that he witnessed during his time in the camp, including many “near-death” events in which he himself was involved. He describes the efforts made by the SS personnel to avoid infection from the diseases that flooded the camp by isolating the prisoners, the collective punishments imposed on the camp prisoners for escape attempts, the prisoners’ daily struggle with hunger through creative means, the worsening of conditions in the camp as the war continued,