A good young German in the Third Reich

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	• Defying Hitler: A Memoir Sebastian Haffner Picador, 2003 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Answers a lot of questions...

If you are like me and you've always wondered just how an insane madman like Adolf Hitler came to power in a modern country like Germany than read Defying Hitler. The author, who describes his personal experiences of the time, pulls no punches and makes no excuses for the shift to radical nationalism in Germany in the 1930s.

The book is presented much like a diary recounting the author's life at specific times in Germany between WWI when he was a small child and 1933 when the Nazi regime began to reveal it's true face to the German people.

Sebastian Haffner presents his own theory about where this radical nationalism first developed and supports his theory with what he experienced.

It's an excellent book and a great read.

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Chilling

The book "Defying Hitler" is a memoir by Sebastian Haffner. It was written in 1939, but wasn't published until 2000. The author of this book writes so well that it is as if you were there doing what he was doing and hearing what he was hearing. The imagery of this book is amazing. It makes you wonder what other amazing works were inspired by the cruelty of war and that of Hitler. The author's son published and translated this book one year after his father died. The author took me on a journey to his childhood and brought me into his mind and safely back to where I am now. This is what I call being a good writer or a master of sleep deprivation...but I digress.

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Very interesting book

Everytime I thought of Nazi Germany, up until I read this book, I only envisioned Hitler, the war and the persecution of the Jews. This book got me thinking of what might have gone through the minds of ordinary German citizens, espacially those who (secretly) opposed the Nazi regime.

Geschichte eines Deutschen

I read the German version of Haffner's wonderful little book, Geschichte eines Deutschen (Story of a German). Sebastian Haffner uses his personal life story to explain the inexorable march of the German people into the catastrophe of the second World War, the Final Solution of the Jewish problem, the Holocaust.

The book ends with the end of 1933, one year after Hitler's Machtergreifung. The book is unfinished, eleven years of the history of the Third Reich remain to be told, but everything that will follow already seems inevitable, just weeks after the Nazis seized power. It is terrifying to see how easy it was to tear down the Weimar Republic, to suspend individual freedoms, to take away human rights.

I can't vouch for the quality of the English translation - judging by what is available at Amazon, it is excellent - but the German original is possibly the best that Haffner ever wrote.

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A good young German in the Third Reich

Haffner's autobiography from his birth until December 1933, written in 1939 after his emigration in the previous year. The political analysis is acute; and it is fascinating - and unusual - to read of the disgust of a young and very German non-Jew with the Nazi regime, revealed in telling episodes.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5

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Yet more books I want to read about Germany
Books of the profound kind!

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