Defying Hitler: A Memoir

Sebastian Haffner

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Review

When the historian Sebastian Haffner died in 1999, his son, Oliver Pretzel, found amongst his late father’s papers a manuscript, a memoir of his father’s early life and his experience in Germany during the rise of the Nazis up to 1933.  It had been written in 1939, by which time the author had escaped to Britain.

In his later life, Haffner had often been critical of his own earlier work, but Pretzel was encouraged by friends to have the manuscript published, and the resulting book caused a sensation in Germany.  Its contents were so unpalatable to some Germans that it was alleged that the manuscript had not in fact been completed before the war, but altered subsequently.  Extensive tests by the German state forensic laboratories proved this allegation to be false.

The central question of this memoir, set against the backdrop of a young man’s experiences as he grows up in the era immediately after the First World War, is quite simply: how were the Nazis possible?  Haffner, writing with all the vigour and anger of a young man whose life has been turned upside down by the catastrophe which has engulfed his own country, is unsparing in his analysis of the behaviour of all Germans during that dark era.  He finds the roots of the Nazi revolution in the euphoria that greeted the outbreak of war in 1914; more obviously, perhaps, also in the defeat which followed, and then through the weird years of hyper-inflation.  Most originally, and strikingly as far as this reader was concerned, he feels that the individual German’s capacity for happiness was ‘less developed among the Germans than among other peoples’ – leaving them susceptible to ‘mass intoxication’.  You can choose not to accept his analysis, but Haffner makes a very convincing case, claiming too that the so-called ‘sports craze’ of the inter-war years, when thousands of young Germans joined leagues and teams, left those who took part with a yearning for parading and marching and ‘teamwork’, although later, of course, it was all in aid of something altogether more sinister than throwing the javelin.

The other striking aspect of the book is the fact that the young Haffner, writing in 1939, talks of concentration camps and of Nazi atrocities as self-evident.  This makes the protests of those who saw nothing and knew nothing sound distinctly hollow.  Haffner predicts with remarkable accuracy what will happen to all of Europe, and his testimony ranks with that of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (author of Diary Of A Man In Despair ) as one of the most remarkable written records of the era. - review by Dan Fenton