No doubt he has little sympathy for those German revisionist historians, such as Ernst Nolte, who claim a causal link between the Nazi mass murder of Jews and the earlier Stalinist extermination of kulaks. From this privileged position, Langbein was able to gather a mass of vital information about the camp and to play a key role in the international resistance there.Against All Hope is a meticulously researched history of rebellion in Nazi concentration camps from 9 November, 1938 - the date of the infamous pogrom in Germany known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of the Broken Glass" - to 6 May 1945, when the last National Socialist camp was liberated.Langbein insists that these camps were an isolated instance of human infamy. but to help us understand," said Levi.Born in Vienna in 1912, Langbein went to Spain in 1938 with the International Brigades. He was interned in France and then deported to Auschwitz where he was appointed secretary to an SS physician. The murderers had the same blood and minds as us, the same grey faces.Langbein's classic study, Menschen in Auschwitz (1972), was a book which Primo Levi wished he had written himself "It has not been published to accuse anyone ...

Watched by the rest of the class, Levi did his best to chalk the watch-towers and electrically charged barbed-wire fences on to the blackboard. The pupil then offered Levi his own plan for escape: "Here, at night, cut the throat of the sentinel; then, put on his clothes; immediately after this, run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity ... after that, I could leavewithout any trouble." It sounds as easy as pie; like something out of The Colditz Story. Levi's anecdote illustrates the gap which grows ever wider between the reality of the Final Solution - how a civilised nation could commit such a crime as the extermination of all Jews within its power - and the way the historical events have been distorted through myth and film.The Night Porter, for instance, presented a sado-masochistic love affair between an SS camp commandant and his former prisoner. Hermann Langbein deplores this master-slave stereotype (the evil Nazi versus the poor Jewish victim). Auschwitz was not the work of demons, but of ordinary menschen - human-beings. A schoolchild once asked the Italian writer Primo Levi, who had survived Auschwitz, to draw a sketch of the prison camp.

Why did you not try to escape? How could you go like lambs to the slaughter? Survivors of Nazi concentration camps are often asked these questions. Escape as a moral duty, however, is the fantasy of POW adventure movies (Steve McQueen in The Great Escape) or comic-strip fictions such as The Count of Monte Cristo. Auschwitz was not Alcatraz; the mass extermination of European Jewry did not allow for escape. It's not self-evident that because he's committed suicide the system must have been at fault.". "He may have been at risk of attack from other prisoners." Which is why West was kept in a reinforced cell and was always accompanied by at least two officers when out of it."If he had been attacked by fellow prisoners and killed - as was the case with Jeffrey Dahmer in the States - that would have been a greater cause for questioning than the fact that he's committed suicide," adds Professor Morgan "There are some suicidesthat are not preventable. West was only one.Judge Tumim's notion that another prisoner should have shared a cell with West does not meet with universal approval.

Who, after all, would have wanted to be a bunk-mate with a man accused of such a gruesome series of crimes?"With a Category A prisoner like West the Home Office has a dual duty," says Professor Morgan. The problem is that large numbers of prisoners are on the 15-minute watch, which is very staff intensive Many succeed in committing suicide in the short intervals. More serious cases are put in cells closer to warders' offices or on the ground floor in the prison hospital; the worst are put on a special watch that requires officers to look into their cell every 15 minutes and their state to be recorded on a log-sheet. Scars across the wrists are common enough.Those deemed at risk are marked for informal supervision. They are trained to watch for signs that newcomers may in the past have harmed themselves.