Beyond Crime and Punishment is a book written by the Austrian philosopher and writer, former prisoner of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen Jean Amery in the mid-1960s, a decade when there was debate about the cost of World War II, the guilt of the Germans and the moral consequences of the concentration camps found itself at the center of European intellectual life. Améry contrasted the abstract moralizing of his contemporaries with his personal, radical experience, summarized in a series of essays about the existence of an intellectual in a concentration camp, physical torture, the right to revenge, the impossibility of forgiveness and the collapse of national self-identification caused by the persecution of Jews during the Nazi years.