From a Good German, a different kind of story (Review of J. Fest Autobiography)

International Herald Tribune ^ | 10/22/2007 | John Vinocur

[mojito]

....Fest's book, in its description of his family's difficult life in Berlin, also testifies to the absolute trivialization of the Nazi era (and demonization of America) present in blogs seeking to create a category of Good Americans, comparable in their submissiveness on Iraq to the so-called Good Germans who went along with Hitler.

Superimpose this episode from "Ich Nicht," for example, against all those crushing terrors and pressures for political conformity in American suburban life in 2007:

Fest's father, Johannes, is out of a job as a school principal because he will not sign a statement of allegiance to the Nazis. His little girls are celebrating a birthday in the backyard. Herr Henschel, their vicious neighbor, is standing on his balcony in his black SS uniform, "fists balled on his fat hips, screaming that he forbids the Fest girls" to bring disorder to a garden that is not his own.

As Fest makes clear, nobody in Berlin in 1940 was listening to radio call-in shows debating whether the invasions of France and Poland were morally acceptable....

[mojito]

Fest (now deceased) was the author of an excellent biography of Hitler, and was a proudly anti-Nazi German conservative.

[period end of story]

BTTT.

[ops33]

You are right, perhaps the best biography on Hitler ever written.