I had high hopes from this book. A quirky story about documents found in an old chair but unfortunately I found it a bit hard going. There was a lot of research done before writing the book and it showed. At points I found the research overwhelming and lost the point, the person behind the documents.

Not really the sort of book I would usually read - but having received a free copy to review - I thought I'd give it a look.

Fascinating read - and a good insight into one man's desire to find out about a Nazi SS officer through dome old documents found in a char.

Very determined & thorough research resulted in building a picture of what the author called ' an ordinary Nazi '

An enjoyable read.

The SS Officer’s Armchair - Daniel Lee

I was given a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review thanks to Random House and Netgalley.

This is not my usual sort of book, in fact I stumbled upon this one by accident.

Daniel Lee has thoroughly investigated the life of Robert Griesinger, a German lawyer, and a member of the SS. Lee was tipped off about Greisinger through the discovery of some nazi documents that were found in an armchair that was sent to be re-upholstered.

I have learnt a lot from reading this book and you can see just how much time and effort Lee has put into researching the information that has been included.

Rating: 4/5
A very detailed read.

Such a good book. It tells the story of an SS officer and his family and gives us facts about the war and the effects on so many peoples lives.
It was an enlightening book and the author gathered so much history and information from many family members and others who knew of them. It felt to have been done with compassion and consideration towards their feelings however, as it can’t always be an easy subject to discuss.
The part which I found most moving and sad was the possible discovery of the grave of this SS officer, buried unmarked with dozens of other unknown people. So very sad and speaks of the absolute futility of war. Even so, a very good read about an amazing discovery within a chair.

This was a reference book with a difference. It told of an amazing story and the author had great skill in pulling the reader into the story. The book gives a very detailed view of German life during the war and the author must have spent an extremely long time researching this book as the detailed information is excellent. Daniel Lee is definitely an historical detective of note.

Who would have thought that an old armchair could have had such a tale to tell. The book certainly providing me with a lot of information that I was unaware of about the second world war and about the SS and Gestapo.

If you are into historical non-fiction then I would definitely get hold of a copy of this book. It also contains a detailed index and the referencing is excellent.

The author was at a dinner party when he was approached by Veronika to talk about something that happened to her mother, Jana, after she tries to get an armchair reupholstered and is condemned by the person, for the Nazi paraphernalia found in it, and told they don't do work for Nazis.

From there we are lead into a very detailed research into the life of Robert Griesinger.

On the surface he appeared to be a low level lawyer, single, who just happened to find himself working for the Nazis, but with no real affiliation for them.

The story which was painstakingly researched, shows that this was far from the truth.

On the whole I enjoyed the book, but found it jumped around a fair bit, one minute I was reading about one of Griesinger's living black relative in 1943, and the next paragraph was about the four year civil war in the US, so that threw me on a few occasions. I think the timeline needs to be worked on.

I also found there were some assumptions, does it mean because your father came from the deep south of America, you had to be a racist?

I did enjoy the book although it is not the easiest to read, there are a lot of names, places, there is a list of characters at the front, but not always easy to jump back and forth whilst on a Kindle.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage Publishing for letting me review the book in exchange for an honest review.

I have to admit being interested in this book only because of the title. Reupholsters apparently often find furniture to have documents stashed within the cushions, and so it was with Robert Griesinger's chair.
It started with a chance encounter at a dinner party, when historian Daniel Lee met Veronika whose mother had been gjven documents found in her chair. The documents would proved that its previous owner was a middle ranking SS officer.
Meticulously researched this book, as the author states, shows that it is possible to trace the life of one of those ordinary nameless and faceless Nazis whose role in war and genocide seems to have vanished from the historical record.
Griesinger and his colleagues had the responsibility to ensure there was enough beer bottles for the troops and punishing individuals for not recycling, timing soldiers trips to brothels (10 minutes apparently), to impounding business from their rightful owners. All the while working in a building with a torture chamber in its basement.
Paced like a detective novel, this book shows that the German killing machine needed thousands of anonymous acquiescent bureaucrats.

For me this was an important book. I have family who have lived through this period but who can't bring themselves to talk about so this filled in so many gaps and understandings for me. The story, the real life story, is a researcher into the Second World War is approached by a women who's mother has found some documents. The documents had been stashed in the cushion of a chair that she'd bought decades before in Prague. She sent if for repair but when trying to collect it she is shocked that the repairer refuses to touch it - he won't work on anything that to do with teh Nazis. The daughter asks for help in finding out about the papers. So begins years of researching archives and interviewing people and visiting places where the man named in the documents had been. The book relates his fascinating journey and the conclusions are sobering. I repeat, an important book.

It took me longer to marshal my facts and my thoughts to write my review of this book than it took me to read it. This is because, while I must praise unreservedly the patience, diligence and fairness with which the author researched, travelled and interviewed his way to the completion of his work, I will be putting forward some areas for further inquiry and further thought.

Starting with a bundle of personal documents found hidden in a chair by a Czech emigre in the Netherlands, the author sets out to track down the descendants and investigate the life of one Robert Griesinger, a German bureaucrat in occupied Prague, who seems to have died there in 1945 at the time of the liberation. It turns out, but is not immediately obvious, that Griesinger was a member of the Allgemeine SS and the first thing for the reader to understand is that this organisation, sister to but distinct from the armed paramilitary Waffen SS, was very big and was key in the first instance to making the German state function as a NAZI state, and then to making various annexed and occupied territories function as slave states. (What is also true, but the author doesn’t quite discover, is that civilian Allgemeine SS men, like Griesinger, throughout the NAZI bureaucracy, enabled the Waffen SS to function as a front-line military force. This is because the SS was never a fully-authorised client of the official German ordnance procurement system, especially for small arms, and most of its firepower had to come from sources other than the main German arms factories. Czechoslovakia was an important source of small arms for the SS, ranging from pistols up to the SS41 anti-tank rifle. The Allgemeine SS bureaucrats had to keep certain factories running, no matter what others wanted, to ensure that the Waffen SS was indeed armed. Hollywood films which show SS and Gestapo men with Luger and P38 pistols are very misleading. In the main they would have been supplied with almost everything except Luger and P38 pistols, which were reserved for the Werhmacht. The Radom pistol factory was moved from Poland to France by the Nazis, specifically to equip the Gestapo. Czech “CZ” pistols were supplied to the SS. Some German policemen ended up with stripper-clip-fed Steyr Hahn pistols from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

The author traces Robert Griesinger’s journey from Stuttgart to Prague, and his father’s journey to Stuttgart via New Orleans. Griesinger did not start out as an SS man in any form: like many career-minded young men he held pretty right-wing views but did not actually join the NAZI party till he had to, in order for his career to progress -and that did not happen till the NAZIs had power, of course. This is why the NAZI Party always drew a distinction between those who joined before they had power, and those who joined afterwards. It was not an arbitrary distinction, either, because the author finds that early and late members of the party were different types of men! Griesinger never really departs from the path of self-advancement and self-promotion, and the system was designed on the assumption that this would be so. The party had no illusion that his generation was serving it from any sort of principle. He was respectful to his wife and kind to his children, but there was an instruction manual telling Allgemeine SS men to be respectful to their wives and kind to their children. A caring party leaves nothing to chance.

The New Orleans connection leads the author to compare Nazi race laws with American ones and the American ones were (in the thirties and forties) more exclusive. (I already knew that even today, the US Government’s definition of “white” for census purposes is more exclusive than that used in Apartheid South Africa. The official American definition of “white” would make President Botha turn quite pale.)

The author describes deep hatred by German people (not necessarily NAZIs) of black people: there’s more in this subject than he appears to think, for two reasons:

It was the policy of the French occupying forces in German after WW1 to subject German citizens under their control to regular humiliations. Not only whenever a citizen had to deal with French soldiers or officials, but during regular parades in all the notable towns under French occupation, where racist caricatures of German people were carried through the streets by French soldiers and citizens simply couldn’t avoid seeing. It was also policy for these humiliations to be largely executed by black colonial soldiers in the French army. (Source: “Travellers in the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd.) By the time the occupation was over, the deliberate humiliation had bred hatred and in 1940 it boiled over onto any black troops, especially black French troops, the Germans captured.

But that hatred was not universal: not all Germans hated all black people; even Hitler had courteous dealings with some. An African-American scholar, Dr Milton S. J. Wright, did his Economics PhD at Heidelberg University, where he found himself an object of curiosity rather than hatred. When he had lunch with his friends at a hotel where Hitler was staying, he was invited by two SS men to meet Hitler and several hours of debate (over tea) ensued. Dr Wright found Hitler a bit disturbing, but not threatening or unfriendly, and Hitler would later make Dr Wright’s thesis required reading for German officials engaged, like Robert Griesinger, in economic work. (Source, again, “Travellers in the Third Reich”. I must commend Julia Boyd’s work to readers of “The SS Officer’s Armchair”, not out of some PC-requirement for “balance” but for the sake of a more complete understanding of the world in which Robert Griesinger grew up and found himself drawn into the NAZI party by his own self-interest.)

The author also notes, prominently, that Griesinger and many of his SS peers came from Protestant backgrounds. You wouldn’t go out of your way to state that nearly all of Mussolini’s men had been brought up as Catholics, or that many of Stalin’s thugs had Orthodox Christian roots. The significant thing is, and the author misses this, that the NAZIs saw Christianity in ANY form as a rival for the love and loyalty of the Germany people, and proceeded to infiltrate and take over the Protestant Church in order, not to make it the official religion of NAZI Germany, but to make it extinct (altars were desecrated, bibles replaced by Mein Kampf, pastors sent to concentration camps if they failed to accept blasphemous doctrines and so on.) Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl were also from a protestant background, and, like Robert Greisinger they were born in Wurttemberg. In different ways they did their best to oppose Hitler (or do him in, in Elser’s case). What more could they have done, other than what they did do and which the NAZIs executed them for?

I am not finding fault, I am urging the reader to look at the subject of SS bureaucrats in a wider and deeper way than this book, by itself, allows. And the reason why I want this is because the holocaust-related mantra of “never again” has failed and once more we see a vast and powerful militarised bureaucracy building and populating concentration camps, destroying religions in detail, putting the image of the party leader above the altar in the churches, herding blindfolded victims in their hundreds onto trains departing for unknown destinations. The parallel between the Allgemeine SS and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is actually pretty strong, and so many people have already compared the “610 Office” to the Gestapo that it’s almost superfluous to make the point. We need to know exactly how Robert Greisinger and the other SS bureaucrats functioned, because there is another bureaucracy: the same thing, but bigger and stronger with technological tools that Himmler could only dream of, that needs to be defeated if we are not to imminently witness another holocaust, both bigger and more technologically-advanced than that of 1942-1945.

I found this book quite hard to read as the atrocities of world war 2 always get to me. This book highlights the terrible events which lead to SS officers doing what they did. It’s eye opening and if you have an interest in wwII you will find this book a compelling read.

Hmmm… I have to say I'm on board with this author's intent – to blow a few preconceptions out the way, and portray how a humble kind of guy, upper class yes but not too bright at school, came to be an SS member and a desk worker who helped out the Nazi intent of killing Jews across Europe. I just found this a little lacking in a certain something to fully engage me – and it may have been that you do need the bigger names to really grip, or something extra that these pages lacked. What they do have is a remarkable beginning, how two women wanted their chair restuffed, only to have it thrown back in their faces when the Dutch upholsterer found a dossier of Nazi paperwork hidden inside. Cue many back-bending years, and much forensic detail in the telling, as our guide to the owner of the paperwork details how he found what he found, which was of course pretty much all new to the daughters of our Nazi. Again, this is going to be a telling, perhaps key text, as people grasp on to the last first person memoirs of people related to SS men, and work out what made them tick, but again it didn't strike me as being as enjoyable to read as some other skeletons-in-the-closet reveals. Three and a half stars, certainly, but I remain a little perplexed as to why I didn't like it more.

After nazi papers with swastikas are found in an armchair whole being reupholstered, Lee goes on to investigate Greisinger and his SS activities.

The SS Officer's Armchair is extremely well researched, it's an interesting read because of the depth of the knowledge Daniel Lee has on the subject.

Agreeing with other reviews, this is a thoroughly researched book and portrayed how one 'ordinary' man lived through the Nazi era. Terrifying and fascinating in equal measure, I dipped in and out of this book for a couple of weeks. Heavy reading but definitely one to get stuck into for those who are interested in the rise of the Nazis.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This is what history is really about, the pursuit of the lives of ordinary people and how major events affected them. Daniel Lee is a Jewish historian who offers his readers what is really a detective story. A chance contact by Lee leads to him being shown documents that were found sewn into an armchair in need of recovering. That sets him off to explore its owner. The chair was opened by Robert Griesinger, a resident of
Stuttgart and a qualified lawyer who works for the Nazi’s SS. The author makes the point that low level offices were rarely prosecuted after the war despite making an important contribution to all that happened. They pretended that they had done what they were told and didn’t understand its significance. The author uses the discovered documents to trace the Griesinger family, revealing to his descendants much they did not know. Robert had been posted with his family to the German occupied Prague and although his family escaped, he did not and died there. This is a fascinating book, clearly researched with great care and also dealing very sensitively with the surviving elderly relatives who did not realise all that their relative had been up to. It is well worth reading.

I think your levels of enjoyment, or at least satisfaction, with this book will depend on how much you know about the subject. This is an intermediate non fic text on how Nazi ideals became prevalent in Germany. It filled in some gaps for me but a lot of it wasn’t new or told in a new way. That’s fine, I’ve read widely on the subject and this was still informative and entertaining. Someone who knows more than I do may find themselves disappointed in terms of content. Otherwise this is accessible and well written

An interesting and informative non fiction book about how easily the Nazi view became prevalent in Germany.

I found this book a little disappointing. The idea behind it was a good one, but the story just isn't interesting enough to sustain a whole book. It would have made an interesting magazine article.

A rather disappointing read that doesn't tell us much about anything really.. It all starts with finding SS officer's documents in an old chair, so I was expecting some kind of fascinating story.. But as it went there were bits and pieces about this and that.. It's all full of "what Griessinger might've been doing there and then" and some of the historical facts. If you want to know about Third Reich's history of WWII there are much better and more informative books to read. I found it strange that the author seemed to be shocked that someone can lead a normal family life and work for SS/Gestapo at the same time like it's something out of this world.
To sum it up it's kind of a vague biography of someone insignificant that also involved more guessing than actual facts.

wow! This book totally hooked me, I've read Anne Frank and seen Schindlers list. This book charts the story of a real life and somewhat "ordinary" nazi. I was intrigued and disgusted in equal measures. A great piece of literature.