Defying Hitler: A Memoir, 1914–1933

AN ORDINARY GERMAN'S MEMOIR OF HITLER'S RISE TO POWER

Born in Berlin in 1907, Sebastian Haffner came of age against the backdrop of a rapidly-changing Germany: an economy ravaged by the First World War, the radicalisation of political parties through the Weimar years, the fateful rise of Hitler's National Socialists. He watched as his peers were entranced by Nazi propaganda, even himself briefly feeling the pull of an ideology that promised purpose and pride in the face of nihilism and defeat.

Yet Haffner defied Nazism's promises and, as a political émigré, went on to author some of the century's most important studies of Hitler and the Nazis. This memoir - written in 1939 after his emigration to England, but only discovered after his death six decades later - is an astonishingly insightful portrait of that generation of Germans born in the first decade of the twentieth century who, in such large part, came to be seduced by Hitler and Nazism. Critically acclaimed around the world by scholars and readers alike, it is an invaluable record of a society on the precipice of catastrophe.

'An astonishingly effective and well-written explanation of how the Nazis managed so easily to exploit Germany's psychological weaknesses' ANTONY BEEVOR