page_title: Eugen Kogon
section_title: Journalism
hierarchical_section_title: Eugen Kogon / Journalism
caption_attribution_description: Eugen Kogon testifies for the prosecution, Buchenwald trial, Dachau, Germany Deutsch: Eugen Kogon sagt für die Anklage im Buchenwald-Process, Dachau, aus.
context_page_description: Eugen Kogon was a historian and Nazi concentration camp survivor. A well-known Christian opponent of the Nazi Party, he was arrested more than once and spent six years at Buchenwald concentration camp. Kogon was known in Germany as a journalist, sociologist, political scientist, author, and politician. He was considered one of the "intellectual fathers" of both West Germany and European integration.
context_section_description: In September 1945, Kogon and other journalists, among them Walter Dirks, later his friend and companion, published the Frankfurter Leitsätze ("Frankfurt Guiding Principles"). In this Program of the Volkspartei ("popular party"), they called for an "economic socialism on a democratic basis", laying out an important basis for the Christian-socialist founding program of the Hessian Christian Democratic Union (CDU), also for the Constitution of Hesse, which was finalized at the end of 1946 and provided for the nationalization of key industries.
  In 1946, Kogon and Dirks founded the Frankfurter Hefte ("Frankfurt Notebooks"), a cultural and political magazine with a left-wing Catholic point of view. 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. In the Gesellschaft Imshausen, Kogon was involved in the search for a "third way" in the renewal of Germany. He quickly turned away from Konrad Adenauer's CDU, which was not interested in communal ownership and nationalization of key industries. Kogon instead wrote many essays taking a critical look at the Adenauer government. Among other issues, he turned against the Wiederbewaffnung, atomic weapons and the "madness of excessive armament".
caption: Giving his eyewitness testimony on 16 April 1947 at the Buchenwald Trials
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