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Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, over nine days 1,400 were
killed and more than 6,000 - about a third of them wounded - were
captured. It was a bloody disaster. The remarkable Louis Hagen, an
'enemy alien' who had escaped to England having been imprisoned and
tortured in a Nazi concentration camp as a boy just a few years
earlier, was one of the minority who made it back. What makes this
book so unforgettable is not only the breathtaking drama of the
story itself, it is the unmistakable talent of the writer. The
narrative was first published anonymously in 1945.45 years later at
a dinner party in Germany, Louis Hagen met Major Winrich Behr,
Adjutant to Field Marshal Model at Arnhem. Louis added his side of
the story to add even more insight to the original work.
When Louis Hagen returned to Berlin immediately after the war,
having survived not only incarceration and torture in a German
concentration camp but also the Battle of Arnhem, it was through a
desire to see the great German eagle toppled, its talons drawn. The
son of a wealthy Jewish banker, he had seen his family flee their
home, and many of his relatives had died at the hands of the Third
Reich. He wanted to understand the German people; why had so many
welcomed the Nazi Party, and were they now humbled and wiser? Hagen
interviewed nine people he had known before the war who represented
a wide spectrum of German society. They were an SA officer, a
businessman, a doctor, a socialite, a journalist, a professional
soldier, an SS wife, a member of the Hitler Youth and a mischling,
or half Jew. Four were Nazis, three were collaborators, and two
were anti-Nazi. The very fact that none of these people was a
high-ranking Nazi official or a survivor of the Holocaust provides
an insight into the Third Reich that is a revelation even for those
who know this period of history intimately. How could the Baroness
sent to Theriesenstadt concentration camp hold salons for ex-Nazis
after the war? Through the lives of nine ordinary Germans, tracing
their experiences of Nazism from the first hopeful days until the
horrors of the Russian occupation of Berlin, Louis Hagen provides a
salutary and unforgettable record of the German people in the
shadow of the swastika.
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