A Farewell to Robert Kogon and a Substack Recommendation

Well, I guess it is time to say farewell to Robert Kogon. It has been a remarkable experience writing as Kogon: remarkable seeing my Kogon articles “go all over the place,” as my first publisher as Kogon put it, and then to watch, so to say, from the inside as Kogon became a non-person, not only on the erstwhile “social media” platform X, but also, to a very large extent, in Google search results.

That experience has reinforced my conviction, as first expressed in this Twitter thread begun in November 2021, that the battle not to preserve, but, in the meanwhile, restore freedom of speech is the most fundamental political battle of our times. For those wishing to continue receiving critical coverage of European politics with a special focus on this issue, allow me to recommend that you subscribe to John Rosenthal’s new Transatlantic Intelligencer on Substack here. A welcome post with some links to articles that you may have missed is available here.

I may continue posting links for a time here, but this Substack will soon go silent.

Robert Kogon, as some of my German-speaking readers undoubtedly figured out, was named for Eugen Kogon: a political prisoner at Buchenwald who was the author of the definitive analysis of the system of Nazi concentration camps, Der SS-Staat (The SS State). In his book, Eugen Kogon touches upon the Nazis’ testing of experimental vaccines on inmates from Buchenwald, many of whom died. One of the main suppliers of those vaccines was the Behringwerke or “Behring Works” manufacturing facility in Marburg: a subsidiary of the infamous IG Farben chemical trust, which also manufactured Zyklon B.

I chose the pen-name when I made the astonishing discovery that the German company BioNTech was manufacturing mRNA for its eponymous “Pfizer-BioNTech” Covid-19 vaccine at none other than the Behring Works.

Apart from trolls and whatnot, whether amateur or professional, I hope we’ll meet again.

RK