I don’t know how I missed reading this very important book earlier for it has been so many years since its first publication in 1940.

This book made one thing clear for me; that not all Germans are to blame for the Holocaust; that not all Germans liked the Nazis; that not all Germans knew or caught onto what was happening to them or to their country; that not all of them participated in the heinous crimes. If anything, some of the anti-Nazis were done away with or badly punished by the regime.

At the time, the author of this book, William Russell, was a clerk who worked in the immigration section of the American Embassy in Berlin. Although his stay in Germany began in 1937, his notes and the penning of his memoirs must have begun in 1939. I think he didn’t grasp, then, how important this book would become when he started taking notes for it.

He says in the beginning, “I have put down the small things that happened to small people in the hope that they would give the best picture of Germany as it is today.” That is in 1939.

A little more than a year later, on April 13, 1940, Russell left Germany. “I said good-bye to a flock of people — Americans, Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis, rich, poor, intellectuals, bums — whom I had more or less collected over a period of three years.”

His personal experiences of life in Berlin during the time when the war was just about to begin and people were on edge are eye-opening. At the time, World War II was just beginning with Nazi Germany already well established with Hitler in power for the last six years.

Still, most Germans were anti—Nazi or contemptuous of the Nazis, but they did not voice their opinions in fear of the minority favoring the regime because the ones that did, they lost in some way when reported.

Those in the middle were at best cynical. Yet, if a war were to be fought, they thought they’d back the regime. The German population was also suffering greatly to think of what was right or wrong.

Electricity, street lights, and heating in winter were almost non-existent because the Nazis probably wanted the population to focus on their daily existence rather than the shortcomings of the regime. As the author says, “the food shortages and the coal shortages and the breakdown of the train schedules were not written up in the newspapers.”

Nobody knew what the real news was. Everyone asked everyone else and rumors were a dime a dozen.

I also found important what the author thought of about the Nazi rulers and the regular people he came in contact with, people who were friendly but were afraid to say what they thought and experienced. Still during their visits and parties, if they trusted the others the jokes kept flowing about the rulers and the situation in Germany.

Of all the Nazis, “the most hated man in Germany is the little cripple, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels,” says Russell, “the butt of so many sharply pointed jokes.”

He adds that Goebbels as the director of the Ministry for Propaganda and Peoples’ Enlightenment, who is adept at propaganda, controls the news and the film industry with an iron fist.

The rules set by Goebbels are: “No movies may depict marital trouble. No films on political subjects. No large-scale musical films. No spy films. No gangster films. No films based on the old operettas whose scenes were laid in Russia. No films which glorify or more than mention the Church. No movies about America.” It wasn’t just the film industry but all literature as well that was being controlled.

About, Adolf Hitler, the author says: “In 1933, when Hitler came to power, many people in Germany shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘Oh, let him come. He’s tried long enough. It’s only another form of wild socialism and it will cool off in six months.’ He is a phenomenon; as such, the better one tries to understand him the more Sphinx-like he becomes.”

According to Russell, Hitler was lazy and talked too much, not letting anyone else have a say, ever.

He also mentions the coolness and the lack of diplomatic relations between the American Embassy and official Germany. "As far as diplomatic pleasantries were concerned, we might as well not have an Embassy in the German capital."

In essence, in these following words of the author exists a lesson for all nations: “In order to rule people more easily, the Nazis just reduce them all to the same level and dare them to have any Ideas of their own.”

What is in them is a warning that worse, much worse, things may be in the making, such as the Holocaust.

learning more about the people under strict regimes and especially about Germany just before World War II

the author's candid views and objective look at the situations

is William Russell (1915-2000) who was a clerk on the consular staff of the American Embassy in Berlin.

It throws a light on the part of history that is little mentioned or even thought about.

This is one of the most impressive memoirs I have ever read. Anyone who has an interest in history, I am sure, will find it eye-opening. The reading of the book is not dull at all because the author has written his experiences as he has lived them in clear English.

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Created Mar 17, 2019 at 8:44pm • Submit your own review...