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“Historians have long regarded it as a standard work on Nazi camps and the Gulag, with its unique perspective on repression in the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, Europe’s two most destructive modern dictatorships. But among a general readership in the English-speaking world, the book is virtually unknown.” So writes professor Nikolaus Wachsmann in his introduction to Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler by Margarete Buber-Neumann, first published in 1949. Nearly eight decades later, of all the authors people should know but don’t, Margarete Buber-Neumann tops the list.

Born in Potsdam in 1901, Margarete Greta Thuring trained as a nursery teacher and in 1922 married Rafael Buber, son of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, author of I and Thou. The marriage failed and Margarete lost custody of daughters Barbara and Judith, who later emigrated to Israel. In 1921, Margarete began marching in demonstrations purporting to support the “working class.” She soon met Heinz Neumann, rising star of the KDP, Germany’s Communist Party, which she joined in 1926.

Heinz, who met Stalin in 1922, served on the executive committee of the Communist International, better known as the Comintern. At the KDP’s Berlin headquarters, Margarete worked on Comintern publications, and at the time her sister Babette lived with Comintern stalwart Willie Muenzenberg, the “Marxist Rupert Murdoch.” Heinz and Margarete served as Comintern agents in several countries before taking refuge in Moscow, at a time when Stalin was gearing up the purges.

“Heinz and I were prisoners at large,” Margarete explained. “None of us could leave the country unless we were sent abroad by the Comintern on some mission or other.” The International Control Committee, the Comintern’s highest body was “nothing but a subordinate department of the GPU,” the Soviet secret police, forerunner of the KGB.

The Soviets pressured Heinz to write a book on the Comintern “showing the correctness of its decisions” and condemning “his own serious political errors.” Heinz refused and on November 26, 1937 he was tried and executed the same day. Margarete had no clue of his fate, but knew what the deal was.

“It was no news to me that women were sent to prison in Soviet Russia as zhena, as wives or mothers of male offenders, and for no other reason,” she wrote. “The nearest relatives of a man, wife or grown-up children were held responsible for his misdeeds with him.” So her own arrest was not long delayed. In the notorious Lubyanka prison, Margarete occupied a small cell known as a “dog kennel.” It had no window and “when you are seated your knees almost touched the door.” Staircases in the prison were fitted with nets to “prevent those who were tired of life from throwing themselves over.”

In January of 1939 Margarete was sentenced to five years in corrective labor camps then holding 1.3 million prisoners. She was sent to Kalag, the Karaganda complex on the Kazhak steppe, with 35,000 other prisoners. There she spots a portrait of Nikolai Yezhov after he had been shot and replaced with Lavrentiy Beria. As Margarete breaks up lumps of coal with an axe, “the head flew off and nearly brained me. It would have saved me many years of misery.”

In the camps, “we were always hungry and we were told there were four different kitchens and four ration scales. . . we were in the fourth and worst category, field workers and prisoners in the punishment compound.” During harvest, “we worked from sunup to midday in the fields and from one o’clock to eight o’clock in the office after our return. In the fields we had to perform a certain labor quota.” This was full-on slave labor, but defenders of the camps claimed “you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

Zena, a Gypsy girl is told she should go to school and learn about socialism. “I don’t like it!” Zena shoots back “You can go and —- your mother with your socialism! I’m a free Gypsy.” Margarete loses track of her and other friends. Preyed on by criminals, who were very cozy with camp bosses, she manages to survive. To keep silent about the camps, she tells a fellow prisoner, means “connivance with GPU terror.”

In August of 1939, Stalin signs a pact with Hitler and the next month both dictators invade Poland, effectively starting WWII. Margarete’s sentence is commuted to expulsion from USSR, and she describes what happened on a cold day in early 1940:

We got out on the Russian side of the Brest-Litovsk bridge and waited for them to come up, looking across the bridge into occupied Poland. The men arrived and then a group of GPU men crossed the bridge. We saw them returning after a while, and the group was larger. There were SS officers with them. The SS commandant and the GPU chief saluted each other. The Russian was a good head taller than the German. He took some papers from a bright leather case and began to read out a list of names. . .

We went over the bridge. The three who had protested were hustled along with the rest. Further resistance was useless and they resigned themselves to their fate. When we were halfway across the bridge I looked back. The GPU officials still stood there in a group watching us go. Behind them was Soviet Russia. Bitterly I recalled the Communist litany: Fatherland of the Toilers; Bulwark of Socialism; Haven of the Persecuted. . .

From Brest-Litovsk the prisoners were “sent on in cattle trucks to Bialas. There we were lined up and marched through the streets under SS guard.” From there it was on to Ravensbrück the Nazis’ largest concentration camp for women.

As Buber-Neumann explains, all prisoners wore a small patch, a triangular cloth indicating their status. “Red for political, lilac for Bible Students, yellow in the shape of a star for political Jews; Black and yellow for Jews guilty of ‘racial’  offenses, black triangles for asocials, green for criminals.” The “Bible Students” were Jehovah’s Witnesses, branded “enemies of the state” by Hitler for refusing military service.

The concentration camp staffs were “recruited along National Socialist lines, and the guards were all impassioned Nazi types.” Two of the worst were SS-Gestapo guard Ramdohr and

SS Unterscharfuhrer Binder, the “terror of the workshop.” As in the Soviet gulag, they worked the prisoners like slaves and fed them the bare minimum to keep them going. The camp became “a never ending torture instead of a merely dull misery.” As Margarete came to believe “you’re never so bad off in a concentration camp that things can’t get worse,” and they did.

During 1940 and 1941 “many transports of Polish women were brought into Ravensbrück.  It seemed almost as though Hitler had determined to wipe out the Polish people altogether.” That was the beginning of a “terrible new period” during which “executions frequently took place on the other side of the camp wall while we were drawn up and waiting in silence. . . Sometimes there would be screams and in our minds we pictured the scenes taking place just out of our sight.” After the sick, “hundreds of Jewish prisoners went the same way.”

Professor Karl Gebhardt, chief of medical research at Ravensbrück, used young Polish girls for “experimental transfers of bone and muscle.” Some of the women  “no longer had calves” and many of the women died. Many children were born in the camp but no provision for milk and mothers too undernourished to nurse, Margarete recalled, “hardly one of them lived for more than a month or so. There they lay in rows, crying with hunger and colic, their tiny, wizened faces all wrinkled up.”

The SS also ordered pregnant women to be aborted, even in seventh and eighth month. According to nurse Gerda Quernheim, “the cries of the newborn children could be heard, but only for a moment or so.” As Buber-Neumann showed, the camp was a place of death in other ways not known to the outside world.

In the winter of 1941-2, “the extermination of prisoners by gas began in Ravensbrück.” Prisoner Else Krug was brought before the camp commandant Kogel and a few weeks later “was sent off with a sick transport to the gas chambers.” Another victim was Milena Jusenska, a Czech journalist who spoke German. As Margarete recalled:

She believed to the last she was going to recover. Something precious had gone out of my life with Milena and I felt very near despair. Life seemed to have no further point. When they came to take her body away, I asked permission to go with it to the crematorium. That last little piety was some small consolation. It was a typical spring morning and a warm rain was falling when two prisoners lifted the coffin onto the cart. Somewhere in the rushes of Furstenberg Lake, a bird was singing a melancholy little song. Perhaps the guard at the gate thought it was the rain that trickled down my cheeks.

At the beginning of 1942, a transport of 1,000 women was sent to Auschwitz, “the first time we heard of the concentration camp there.” Bible student Rosa Hahn, who somehow managed to return, told Buber-Neumann that at Auschwitz “living human beings are thrown into the fire, including little children, Jews chiefly. All day long the smell of burning flesh hangs over the camp.”

In 1945, the National Socialists built a gas chamber at Ravensbrück and “in the first 14 days of February, 1945, 4,000 women were gassed” at the camp, where the Nazis had already built a second crematorium. The SS men “were fond of telling us that the only way we would leave Ravensbrück would be ‘up the chimney.’” That prophecy went unfulfilled.

The Allies took down the Nazi regime and Margarete Buber-Neumann gained release. In the ruins of the Reich, the “KZ-ler” – a veteran of a concentration camp – spots the SS guard Ramdohr and cries “arrest him!” The Nazi was later sentenced to death in a trial of the Ravensbrück guards in Hamburg.

More members of the KDP died under Stalin than Hitler, but some Germans clung to the totalitarian faith. When Buber-Neumann asked them who handed German political refugees over to Hitler, she got no reply. Other Germans had turned from Communism and with thousands of “formers,” Margarete wrote, “we would manage to expose the Soviet lie.” But the prisoner of Stalin and Hitler wasn’t out of the woods just yet.

The KZer acquires a bicycle and despite injuries proceeds toward her grandmother’s house in Thierstein.  As she discovered, “It is a miracle what regained freedom makes the human being capable of. One’s strength is doubled and illness ignored.” And it was also something of a miracle that the old house was still standing and her mother on hand calling, “has she really come?”

Margarete Buber-Neumann’s experience confirms that Soviet Communism and German National Socialism were essentially the same. Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler made the author a prime target for the left and an ally for defectors. Margarete testified on behalf of defector Victor Kravchenko, author of  I Choose Freedom, accused of being a stooge for the USA. Kravchenko won his case and as Der Spiegel noted, “the testimony by Margarete Buber-Neumann was the most devastating judgement on the Bolshevik regime made during the trial.”

As professor Wachsmann also notes, Buber-Newmann was attacked as a Trotskyite, Nazi sympathizer and US agent. The author sued and won and “until the end of her career, she continued to speak out against Communism, past and present.”

Margarete Buber-Neumann passed away on November, 6, 1989, days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which she surely saw coming. Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler does not mention Martin or Rafael Buber, but the author had not lost track of her children, nor they of her. In the first edition of her book, Buber-Neumann withheld some names for safety reasons. In 2007, Judith Buber-Agassi restored the names, translated the last 53 pages from the German original, and added the helpful index. It is long past time for this great book to get the attention it deserves.

Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler belongs on the readers shelf with The God That Failed, Witness, The Gulag Archipelago, and Radical Son by David Horowitz, who left us last year. See also Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi. As the author explains, “In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

In similar style in his magisterial Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge – who broke the story of Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine – proclaimed that Nazism and Communism were Teutonic and Slavonic versions of the same ideology. These works, along with classics such as 1984, Animal Farm and The Road to Serfdom have escaped the notice of high-profile Americans.

Tucker Carlson gives National Socialist apologist Daryl Cooper a platform to claim that Hitler never ordered the extermination of the Jews. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a candidate for vice president in 2024, compares socialism to “neighborliness,” and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, touts the “warmth of collectivism.” And now abide hatred, credulity and ignorance, but the greatest of these is ignorance.