Loved this book. Lots of interesting information to digest. This is a great read for anyone who loves to read about history. Very well written

I enjoyed this far more than I was expecting, I thought it’d be an interesting change to read from the point of view from those under hitler in Germany and I wasn’t disappointed, written this through the eyes of the authors childhood pre-war and leading up to the Nazi war crime trials, it really is interesting and a different aspect of the war

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

The title and synopsis of this book had me intrigued and so looking forward to it, but sadly I just could not get into it at all. I don’t think that the style of writing it helped by jumping all over the years rather than what you would expect by going back to the start and reading how the author grew up from birth onwards. I did not finish the book so no review will be posed online but thanks for the opportunity to at least try it.

This was a complete surprise, the author has written this through the eyes of his childhood during the 1930’s and leading to his witnessing of a Nazi war crime trial as a journalist. I enjoyed this book not only from the story telling but from a completely different perspective on the Nazi party. Well worth reading.

Found this story really enlightening. It struck me as a walk through Germany’s history before, during and after the war. It was told through the eyes of a German boy, growing up and eventually going off to fight. It seemed a very practical story looking at the major players in the war time and the failures of their leaders. The book tells us how life in Germany didn’t automatically revert to how it had been pre-war and that people struggled to adapt and adjust to the new Germany. Actually a really fascinating read and I would recommend it.

This was a very interesting book. It tells a side of history we don’t often read about. It’s a great read for lovers of WWII stories.

Horst Kruger was brought up in an innocuous suburb of Berlin, where his parents went quietly about their business, in their staid, unassuming way. He manages to convey the predictability of their lives and their slow slide towards Nazism.
He also tells us of the suicide of his sister, his studies and his interrogation by the Nazis when he's involved with the dissemination of some resistance literature, and his friend who he feels very strongly towards but with whom he loses contact.

He gets drafted into the army and spends four years fighting. He doesn't elaborate about this time at all, and near the end of the war he describes his despair and subsequent surrender to the Americans.

In the 1960's he returns to the suburb where he grew up, and philosophises about the events and the circumstances that led to the rise of Nazism. He also, in his capacity as a journalist, attends the trial of 22 guards who are on trial for murder and the atrocities committed at Auschwitz. He contemplates the defendants, who appear to be normal, decent people, but who have committed the most brutal acts imaginable. This for me was the most powerful part of the book, reading him describe the actions of these seemingly harmless men who returned to Germany to continue with their lives, in a country where the population is reluctant to accept what had happened at Auschwitz.
This is an important memoir, which is well worth reading especially for anyone interested in this period of history.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc.

A book of childhood and chaos in nazi Germany- first published in the 1960s and only now translated for the English speaking market. Attending the trial in 1965 of former guards of Auschwitz it reminded the author of his childhood growing up under the growing power of Hitler and the nazi party. He remembers how it destroyed everything in his world including his family. It is a sobering if important book but not an easy light read.

If you are interested in how Hitler came to power and why ordinary German people didn't oppose him, this book will be of interest. It's a personal story of one family, and why they went along with what Hitler said and did.

It's a retrospective account written when the author attended Nazi trials in 1965, and looked back at how his family and many others were seduced into believing that Hitler was the best choice for the nation. It was only when his family started unravelling that he slowly started to realise the problems and hear about the deaths caused by the Nazi's.

It's a good and timely reminder of us all to be aware of how politicians lie and hookwink us - giving us soundbites and promises that are never fulfilled, yet acting as if they are; and understanding that because of the confidence, bluff and bluster of the con-man running the country, many people believe and follow (I'm looking at you, Johnson and Trump).

Broken House is the story of how the rise and fall of the Third Reich was seen and experienced by someone who was there. Kruger lived quietly in East Germany where, he and his family tried to avoid anything to do with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi culture. But insidiously and inevitably it gradually swallowed everything and everyone in its path. What Kruger vividly conveys is how people were seduced and duped as to what was really being done by Hitler. Yes, Kruger ends up fighting in the Germany army- there was no choice - but his shame at what was done to the Jews is painful to read. He attends the trial of those involved in 1965 and clearly is still bemused today as to how ordinary German citizens could carry out such terrible crimes. Reading this certainly gives a different perspective and Kruger's simple honesty is to be admired.

First published in 1966, with a 1976 afterword, and now available for an English-speaking readership for the first time, this is a powerful and moving memoir of family life under the Nazis, whilst the latter part of the book describes the author’s attendance at the Auschwitz trials. Horst Kruger was only 14 when the Nazis came to power. The regime was all he knew, and he was later conscripted to fight for it. He came from an apolitical lower-middle class background, from amongst those “harmless Germans who were never Nazis and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work”. He describes with insight and empathy the “phenomenon of the apolitical lower-middle-class which in its social insecurity, its instability and its hunger for irrational solutions provided the fertile seedbed for National Socialism’s seizure of power”. He explores, without facile judgement, issues of guilt, culpability and duty, bringing us all face to face with that eternal question “what would I have done?” Honest, candid and atmospheric, it’s a reflexive and thought-provoking memoir, and a compelling and absorbing read.

An account of an ordinary teenager growing up in Hitler's Germany. I found it slow in parts, especially in the middle but the last chapter describing the Auschwitz trials was interesting and thought provoking.

A really sobering memoir of growing up during the rise of Nazism and Hitler. This book is a very uncomfortable read but something everyone should read. Highly recommended.

This account of a young man’s experience of growing up in the outskirts of Berlin before WWll through the rise and fall of the Hitlers’ Third Reich, is a dramatic story that even today brings to life fractured family life during that time. To the non-German reader and even today’s German generation, it is a revelation of the divisions in the society of the day and how it affected individuals and created divided loyalties. Here is a story that contrasts the changing world of the average German family from a ’normal’ life to the fast-moving influence of the NAZI regime and its consequential impacts.
The personal descriptions I found to be heartfelt and the authors’ decision at the end of the war to surrender, with a colleague, to the Americans by crossing a river and then advising his captors that the remaining German troops had virtually no ammunition left, showed that he realised that his war was over and further loss of life unnecessary. His description of the subsequent trials of the war criminals that he covered as a journalist together with the reluctance of the German population as a whole to not face up to the guilt they should have felt for the atrocities of the Hitler regime, was educational to me and should be to modern day Germany. An excellent read.

A different kind of ‘Me Too’

“I realise that these convivial gentlemen are not ordinary murderers, they are not emotional criminals who kill somebody out of pleasure or lust or despair. All of those things are human. They exist. But these are modern murderers of a kind previously unknown,, the administrators and functionaries of mass death, the accountants and button-pushers and clerks of the machinery: technician who operate without hatred or emotion, little functionaries from Eichmann’s great empire – deskbound murderers. Here a new style of crime becomes apparent: death as an act of administration.”

Horst Krüger’s account of growing up in Nazi Germany was originally published in 1966.
Krüger who died in 1999, was born in 1919, so his formative experience and memory was growing up as far-right politics moved from being ‘just’ something espoused by crazy violent extremists and conspiracy theorists, something which ignored, might perhaps just go away, to something which slid into the bedrock of society. Later, of course, something which was dangerous to resist.

This is the kind of book which one might hope would not ever need to be republished, because, surely, some 90 years on, the lesson’s of history would have been learned, and politics which violently othered one group or other, on grounds of ethnicity, religion, sexuality or nationality, would not be tolerated or accepted anywhere, by anyone.

Of course, the rise of populism, especially within ‘developed democracies’ shows that none of us, none of our cultures, are immune from these dangers.

Here we are, still in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008-2009. Nationalism, protectionism, my country, right or wrong, all on the rise. A global pandemic, blaming other nations for the miseries we might be experiencing. Rich nations versus poorer nations, a proliferation of ways to manipulate thinking so that deliberate creation of fake news, the whipping up of hot reactivity against ‘the enemy’ (some other) is hideously easy.

I read this book, in Stuart Whiteside’s unobtrusive translation with an absolute sense of its present importance, and convinced of the need for its republication.

Again and again, by the cool honesty of Krüger’s writing, exploring his own thinking and actions, and those of the petit bourgeois, ordinary background he grew up in, he reminds ALL of us how easy and insidious it can be to absorb, almost unnoticed, what is unconscionable, until it becomes our daily lives. This is not some lesson of terrible German history. This is something to make all of us look around, look within, look back, look forward

I’m grateful to the writer, the translator, and the publisher for this uncomfortable and hugely pertinent book. And to NetGalley, for allowing me to read this as a digital ARC

I have quite an interest in this period of history and regrettably, this book did nothing to hold my interest. I did not enjoy the style, phraseology or indeed anything about the book. I read a third of the book before starting to skip through to see if things picked up. If they had, I would have continued from the third of a way through mark to the end but sadly they did not. Really disappointed as the book appeared to have a lot of potential for "telling things how they were".

Quite an interesting read this, from an unusual point of view. Because the author is now a journalist he doesn't hide from the dirtier, darker aspects of his own, and others, lives from the time the events in the book were happening.
There are several occasions when I wanted more, his time in prison, his time working for the 'wrong side' ...I felt he left us hanging but the tasty snippets he did offer made for a very readable and enjoyable book.

The Broken House by Horst Kruger is the author's account of him growing up under Hilter's rule. In 1965 Horst Krugar attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt as a German Journalist. Twenty-two former camp guards were charged under German criminal law for their role in the holocaust. As the trial progressed, Horst Kruger felt the "compulsion to question" his own past. He "started to remember, follow the trail and returned to his youth and childhood". The book opens with a description of modern (at the time of writing - 1965) Eichkamp and the author's memory from thirty years prior. The emotional recollection of his youth and normal family life in the days before Hitler is the point at which the book grabs your attention and holds it until the last page. The title of the book is the author's way of describing the self-dissolution of a German family. The account of how his family's orderly life was upended by his sister's suicide and his own teenage rebellion led him to join an anti-Nazi resistant group and narrowingly escaping prison to being sent to fight for Hitler will stay with the reader for a long time.

This is the first English translation of a German memoir originally published in 1966 as “Das Zerbrochene Haus” and subtitled “Growing Up Under Hitler”. In the Afterword the author (who died in 1999) reflects that it was a book which was developed backwards, in a way. As a journalist in 1964 he was invited to attend the Auschwitz trials. This forms the closing section of the book and is the most powerful and it was his attendance which caused Kruger to look back on his life. In the 1960s he was stunned by how perpetrators of unthinkable crimes at the concentration camp had assimilated into society before having to answer for their actions at the trials. I think if this book had been written more recently this central moment would have been the starting point but back in 1966 Kruger chose to employ a chronological approach which leads from his childhood outside Berlin, in Eichkamp, in an apolitical family where his environment would have made the rise of Adolf Hitler seem even more extraordinary. Alongside this are the family dramas, the suicide of his oldest sister in 1939 and his own dallying with resistance and its repercussions.
There is a sense of detachment throughout which may feasibly be from the translation but I would imagine it is from the original text which does affect the flow and holds the reader at arm’s length. There is little of Kruger’s own participation in the hostilities, it jumps to the end of his war, and indeed, this is acknowledged by the author in the Afterword which was written in 1975 and reflects back on the work, but this absence of this part of his life does seem a little odd.
In parts, it is magnificent, especially the second half of the book where Kruger feels to be on more certain ground, the actual growing up under Hitler sections in Eichkamp can feel a little tentative but there admittedly would have been so much that the town’s inhabitants would have been unsure about at the time. It is not quite the masterpiece I had hoped but the author provides many moments that will linger long in my memory.
The English translation of "The Broken House" is by Shaun Whiteside. The book is published on 17th June 2021. The hardback is published by Bodley Head, the e-book by Vintage Digital. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

A compelling and sobering memoir from Horst Kruger of growing up in 1930s Berlin and the rise of Nazism and Hitler.
A very important, thought-provoking text, a very uncomfortable but necessary read. This shows how easy it was for the Nazis to manipulate 'ordinary' people into doing their bidding and believing in them. A frightening thought when you see the darkest parts of history repeating itself before our very eyes in certain countries.
Kruger attended the Auschwitz trials where his countrymen who had been involved in committing the most horrific atrocities. faced judgement.
Thank you to the author, to NetGalley and to Random House for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.