Overview

• Europäische Verlagsanstalt has published an updated edition featuring a new foreword by Werner Renz, renewing access to Bernd Naumann’s work.
• Naumann, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor, documented the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in contemporaneous dispatches and issued the book soon after the proceedings with Athenäum Verlag.
• The volume is widely regarded as the standard account of the trial, noted for its restrained, precise rendering of what was said and done in court.
• Naumann’s reporting preserves testimony detailing torture, starvation and experimental killings and records defendants’ repeated denials of knowledge or responsibility.
• The text influenced cultural and scholarly discourse, earning praise from Hannah Arendt and supplying material for Peter Weiss’s play Die Ermittlung, which reached audiences across Germany and abroad.