The author, who has spent one year in two German concentration camps for political prisoners—Dachau and Buchenwald—reports his psychological observations. He stresses the fact that his observations are to a certain extent based on self-observation and thus subjective in character. They were actually started as a diversion to enable the author to bear his experience.

The aims of the concentration camp as an institution are to break the prisoners as individuals, to spread terror among the rest of the population, and to provide the Gestapo with a training ground and an experimental laboratory. In most cases, the shock of unlawful imprisonment is followed by the even more stunning shocks of transportation to the camp and the first experiences there. Nonpolitical, middle class prisoners experience comparatively more suffering than either politically oriented prisoners or members of the upper classes. The typical initial reactions are feelings of detachment: 'this can't be true … things like this just don't happen'. The first few weeks are