Margarete Buber-Neumann was born in 1901 in Potsdam, Germany. She married Rafael Buber - the son of Martin Buber - and had two daughters with him. After their divorce, she joined the Communist Party, married Heinz Neumann and was sent to a Soviet labour camp and later, to Ravensbrück. After the war, she was invited to Sweden for recuperation where she took an office job and wrote, in the evenings, Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (Under Two Dictators). In 1949 and 1950 she was a key witness in the Krawtschenko and Rousset trials in Paris, disproving the Communist denial of the existence of the Gulag. She spent the rest of her life in Frankfurt, writing and lecturing widely. The author of eight books, she died in Frankfurt in November, 1989.

Nikolaus Wachsmann is Senior Lecturer in modern European history at Birkbeck (University of London), where he is directing a major research project on the Nazi camps. He has written widely on terror and repression in the Third Reich. His book Hitler's Prisons won the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize and was jointly awarded the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award.