This is, without a doubt, one of the best accounts of Hitler’s Germany that I’ve read. That said, it’s not about war, per se, it’s the story of Horst Kruger, a German who was born and brought up in Germany and experienced the build up to war and the effects . In recent years, I’ve come to realise that much of the so called history of the Second World War that I was taught as a child is untrue. I was brought up in post war Britain, where the cities bore the scars of bomb craters, there was rationing and austerity as Britain tried to rebuild. We taught very little about how Germany suffered; I’m ashamed to say that I was unaware until recently that Allied Forces killed over 50,000 Germans in a single night of bombing Hamburg. That’s more than the total killed throughout the entire Blitz, but that’s all we hear about. The point is, war is about ordinary citizens as well as fighting troops. I’m less interested in battles and strategy, more interested in social history and this account hits that spot to perfection.

It’s linear, and split into five separate parts which are a natural progression. Horst was brought up outside Berlin and from the outset, it’s easy to understand that his was an ordinary middle class family who just wanted to get on with their lives after the experience of the First World War. However, the rise of socialism and Hitler’s vision for the world meant this was not to be. This account gives real insight into the tensions and conflicts for individuals, families, neighbours and friends. It’s so ordinary but quite chilling in parts and it appears to be told with honesty. The post war years are particularly touching.

If you have any interest in people or social history, I thoroughly recommend this book. The translation appears to capture the essence of the story and I’m grateful to the publisher for an advance copy via Netgalley.

In 1965 the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men, women and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst. The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand 'how it really was, that incomprehensible time'.

This book grips from the first page, to read of Germany's self-delusion with such unusual and unerring honesty is revelatory and the quality of the writing is first-rate. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

This is more than a memoir by Horst Kruger of growing up in an ordinary lower middle class suburb in Germany. He looks back and tries to make sense of growing up under Hitler, although his parents never joined the Nazi party. I have sometimes wondered how ' ordinary' Germans of that time felt about the Holocaust. Horst looks back with shame, although he made some small contribution to anti Naziism, which led to his arrest and imprrisonment. He later becomes a journalist and attends some of the Auschwitz trials. He is amazed how ordinary, and indeed respectable, some of the defendants are, and how, in the mid sixties, normal life goes on in the streets around the court. It is a very personal journey of someone trying to come to terms with the brutal history of his countrymen.

The Broken House is not a new book – the bulk of it was written in the 1960s, the afterword a decade later – but it is the first time it has been published in English, in a translation by Shaun Whiteside (who also translated the non-fiction Aftermath by Harald Jähner, which I recommend).
What makes The Broken House so powerful is its eye-witness account of disturbing episodes from 1930s and 1940s Germany. Born out of Horst Krüger’s work as a journalist covering the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, it goes back to his youth in the west Berlin suburbs. It struck me how far away the grim and unornamented houses in Eichkamp appeared to be from Berlin; a world away rather than less than ten miles.
His parents are described as staid and unimaginative, seemingly becoming party members without intention: ‘the block warden came and collected our two marks fifty and we were given a badge’. It’s not surprising that the teenage Horst was entranced by his charismatic schoolfriend Wanja and, almost by accident, found himself assisting political dissidents, nor that he was later arrested. The chapter dealing with his spell in Moabit detention centre is told in simple language but it is chilling nonetheless. The investigating judge may be small and mouse-grey but the power he holds is immense. The pace is relentless so that I found it impossible to stop reading; it feels as though Krüger had to get the words out as quickly as possible to shorten the time spent remembering. I wonder if that is part of the reason he chose not to include his experiences between 1941 and 1945. When, in the very last gasps of the war, he surrendered to American troops, he had no idea what they would be like, having known only the Reich since the age of fourteen.
I recommend The Broken House to anyone interested in finding out what life was like for one seemingly ordinary man under Nazi Germany and its aftermath.

In 1965 the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men, women, and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst.

The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand 'how it really was, that incomprehensible time'. He had grown up in a Berlin suburb, among a community of decent, lower-middle-class homeowners. This was not the world of torch-lit processions and endless ranks of marching SA men. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God, and obeyed the law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been, Krüger realised, 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'.

This world of respectability, order, and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Krüger's older sister decided to take her own life, leaving the parents struggling to come to terms with the inexplicable. The author's teenage rebellion, his desire to escape the stifling conformity of family life, made him join an anti-Nazi resistance group. He narrowly escaped imprisonment only to be sent to war as Hitler embarked on the conquest of Europe. Step by step, a family that had fallen under the spell of Nazism was being destroyed by it.

Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides an unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. Yet the book's themes also chime with our own times - how the promise of an 'era of greatness' by a populist leader intoxicates an entire nation, how thin is the veneer of civilisation, and what makes one person a collaborator and another a resister.

An interesting book that depicts a side of the war that is not often talked about or documented, is well written and definitely worth reading especially if history is interesting.

This is an amazingly strong memoir of growing up in Berlin in the 1930s and how Hitler and Naziism crept into every day life. Horst Kruger writes well about his youth, adolescence and later life. The Auschitz Trials in Franfurt form the final part of the original book and the horrors of the crimes committed by those who are now respected citizens of the new Germany is very well dealt with. I studied the wars of the first half of the 20th century for my History degree and this is a text that should be included in future modules. Well translated by Shaun Whiteside. With thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a fascinating and compelling memoir which reflects upon growing up in the Berlin suburbs in the 1930s, the war years and their aftermath. Horst Kruger is an ordinary youth from a respectable middle class family living in the suburbs of Berlin. His parents are apolitical but encourage him to do well at school. He is imprisoned briefly under the Nazis due to a friendship with a youth who was actively political with the Communist party, but released and goes on to serve in the German army. As a journalist in the 1960s, he attends the Auschwitz trials and realises that the defendants are also ordinary Germans like him, whose lives took a different path but are nevertheless similar to him and many other German people in that courtroom and the world around him. History rarely focuses on the lives of ordinary people during extraordinary times and this is an insightful and intelligent account of exactly that.

A memoir of growing up during the Third Reich.

Journalist Krüger attends the Frankfurt trials in the mid-sixties of 22 former Auschwitz guards for the murder of over a million prisoners. The experience dredges up memories of his life in the lead up to and during the war.

Born into a lower middle class family, Krüger grew up in a quiet Berlin suburb. His story illustrates how the Nazis insinuated their way into the ordinary person's life. Yet, for all the personal tragedy, war and atrocity he witnesses, he rarely conveys his emotional response in any depth, leaving the reader feeling at a remove.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage, for the ARC.

The Broken House

This book begins with the author returning to his old neighbourhood in Berlin during the 1960’s. He arrived there as a 3 year old with his parents and his older sister in 1923 and last saw it in 1944. He grew up there as Hitler rose to power and The Broken House is an account of how he came of age as Germany prepared for World War 2 and the Holocaust. It was a lower middle class neighbourhood which was composed of families like his. Kruger’s parents were apolitical but his mother did read Mein Kampf in 1933. Kruger now stands in front of where his house used to be. It’s now a vacant lot after being bombed during the Second World War. He last saw it in 1944 when he was a lance corporal. As his parents waved him goodbye at the train station when he returned to duty, he knew that he would never see them again. He is the only member of his family left alive as his parents were killed during the war and his older sister, Ursula, killed herself in 1938. It is with a shock that he discovers that Ursula’s grave no longer exists. The section where he discusses his sister’s suicide is very sad as he spares no details in her horrible and painful death. It’s his mistake that causes her grave to be disturbed and to have someone else buried in her place. She has left no trace.
During the build-up to war, the suburb gradually changed. The Jewish families all left but it was hardly noticed. Everyone was busy getting on with their lives. Hitler arrives to great cheering and torchlight parades. Everything was going to change and Germany would be on the rise again. But slowly, insidiously their lives become enmeshed with Hitler’s rise. It’s little steps with swastika flags beginning to flutter on neighbourhood houses and the street fights between Communists and brownshirts. Hitler’s ambitious plans make him seem like a Messiah. Major infrastructure projects soon alleviate the 4 million unemployed Germans. New opera houses! Huge new official buildings! The more disturbing signs such as Kristellnacht and food ration cards were warnings of what was to come. But no one saw anything.
Kruger has an eventful life. He joins a small gang who were working against Hitler in the middle of Germany in 1939, is arrested and sentenced for high treason. On release he joins the Army and surrenders to the Allies as the Reich falls. As a journalist in the 1960’s when this book was first published, he reports on the Auschwitz trial of 22 guards. The ‘deskbound murderers’ who were just doing their duty had quietly faded into normal life afterwards as if they had simply erased its horrors from their minds.
This is an extraordinary book as, to some extent, it explains how Hitler seduced the German people. They had tasted a bitter defeat after the First World War, were now in a severe depression and then along comes a man who was going to raise them up again and they would be world players. It always seemed strange to me that these people could claim that no one was a Nazi, they knew nothing about Auschwitz or the other camps and there seemed to be a collective amnesia in the country. Like most takeovers it begins with little steps, one after the other, the flags, the cheering, the upbeat attitude until it was too late.

This is a warning to us all of how a country can be taken over. None of these people became Nazis and yet they ‘were the foundation for the Nazis to do their work.’

It has been said that Germany fell under Hitler’s spell and I could see how it happened. The book questions what makes people accept the unthinkable while others resist.

A thought provoking read and although it’s uncomfortable reading, it was a book that I was glad that I had read.

My thanks to Random House UK Vintage and Netgalley for an ARC.

By the sounds of it, this memoir of growing up in Germany under Hitler was a seminal book in the 1960s, exploring the passive way in which Germans accepted and bolstered Hitler, how so-called ordinary people can go on to do terrible things, and the legacy of the Holocaust. For that reason, I feel a bit bad giving it a mediocre rating - it seems like a very important text! But I didn't get on with the overdramatic writing style or the way in which the narrative jumps around or the constant changes in tense (which seemed purposeless and really, really took me out of the narrative.) There were some very interesting points here, especially around the Auschwitz trial that the author attends and the reflections on the development of Germany into East and West, but I wish they'd been expanded upon more! So many fo the thoughts and narrative felt half-developed, and cut off right when the author begins to explore their depth. As it is, I think The Broken House is an important historical document, but it's not my favourite examination of Germany under Hitler. 3.5 🌟

This is a curious and consuming story that if your interested in History and the common folk the side not often heard from. Everyone is different so is this worth hearing I'd say yes absolutely 💯% and why I gave it 5 stars 🌟

One man tells his story of survival If that's the right word, in some generations I'd say existenced but this is part of the life story of Horst Ķrűger. He is a German Gentleman from the 1900 born as WW1 ended and schooled in the middle of the wars so until 1945 only he only really knew his country ruled by him that is Hitler the one no one wants to talk about specially in his homelands.

Horst Krűger was in a middle class family brought up in the outskirts of Berlin were everyone appears civil apolitical a Catholic Mum and a non practising Protestant Dad, at least I assume he was non practicing their family's and Church's weren't happy about it. This is a generation like no other mind they didn't live through the Pandemic well most that is. Your right that is worse than the Pandemic just saying there are different trials for each generation. So yes every generation is different I grew up at school having to study this time admittedly from the side of the Allies mainly. There were so many films about how Americans swept in and saved the day plus other more factual ones often not from Hollywood strangely enough. I just assumed Germany bad the people as well England the brave Victor's impeccable and good. We all grow up to see things are not that simple or even close to the truth. UK obviously still the best 👌but well love the Germanys mainly excepton on the pitch penalties or not.

Back to the book, I have been having my eye open recently to the other side of things like how Germany turned things around for themselves with help but the people had to deal with their own legacy and how they could deal with their issues if that's the way to put it. Here is a true tale of one man and how things went for him and it is a tale very much worth hearing and I hope you do read this I think it's very with your while.

The author of this book grew up in a 1930’s Berlin suburb. His father was injured in WWI and held a respected job, his mother was a Catholic, who tended to retire with mysterious illnesses. His parents were tired of war, inflation, and conflict. They wanted a quiet life in which to raise their children, tend their garden, compete quietly with their neighbours… They were, as Kruger points out, apolitical, respectable, removed. They tended not to talk to each other, or confront events, but, like many at that time, they were quietly accepting. The rise of Hitler led them to be more confident about their country, suddenly proud of being German, hopeful for change.

Change was certainly coming, and – in this book - the author confronts his youth, under Hitler. Where his parents openly agreed that much information given in the press, on the radio and in the newspapers, was wrong, but warned him not to disagree outside the safety of their respectable house. However, it was impossible to ignore history when it pressed against the very door and the author tells of his young life. Of the suicide of his sister, his inadvertent escapade into treasonous activities, his despair at the end of the war, which led him to surrender to the Americans.

It also tells of his attendance, as a journalist, of the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Of the embarrassment, and unease, that his informing people he would be going to the trial caused. He was aware that nobody wished to hear of those things, but he was keen to understand the myth and the horror, only to discover the banality of evil. ‘Death,’ he muses, ‘as an act of administration.’ Defendants who are indistinguishable from anyone else attending the Court – including, bizarrely, those getting married in another part of the building. Men who have returned to Germany to re-build their life – to act as nurses, shopkeepers, accountants. Take away the uniform of the SS and you are left with middle aged men who go for lunch, laugh and joke with each other, have families. Kruger muses, perceptibly that that may be why so many of their victims do not return to Germany – how can they tell who could have been responsible for that evil, when they look placid now, rather than brutal?

This is a beautifully written, carefully constructed, look at the author’s younger years, when he grew up in a country dominated by Hitler, before this life passes, ‘into the hands of historians,’ as he puts it so well. It is a brave, honest account of how the horrors of Auschwitz occurred in a country where everyone denied all knowledge of what was happening. Indeed, the author himself states he had not heard the word Auschwitz while he was a soldier, but he honestly assesses what he might have done had he been ordered there. His father, never a Party member, was obviously not a supporter of the Nazi’s, but his parents were also impressed by the early successes of the regime, and it was this apathy that allowed what followed. The Jewish neighbours who left, whose absence was not questioned. The denial of knowledge, the looking away. I cannot recommend this highly enough and think it is a must-read for anyone interested in those years. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

This is a compelling memoir of the author’s growing up under Adolf Hitler in the middle class Berlin suburb of Eichkamp and subsequent events. It was prompted by the author’s experience attending the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in February 1964, and the chapter dealing with this is where the author (by then a professional journalist) started writing. Having written about the trial and the apparently ordinary German men who were the defendants, he wondered whether he might have, if ordered, committed similar crimes. And he couldn’t really explain his answer to that question without going back to his beginning.

The writing of this book was obviously a deep emotional process for the author and this is evident in the way certain subjects and people only enter the narrative when he is ready to deal with them. His sister is not mentioned until the chapter which deals with Ursula’s suicide and the author’s two NAZI uncles come, with other relatives, to her funeral. The author’s parents were not NAZIs and did not want their son to ever become one, but there were NAZIs in the family, as was normal in Germany. This is what the author is willing, determined, to face.

Life in Eichkamp is described, often in fairly bleak detail, but not entirely without affection. When, as a young man, the author is arrested by a local policeman and his dog on behalf of the Gestapo, he’s eating his favourite dinner (pease pudding with bacon) with his parents. He’s arrested with about a hundred others for high treason. His parents come to the jail and plead for his release, saying that he’s a good boy really and the investigating officer treats them courteously at least. It turns out that the Gestapo have investigated him in such minute detail that they cannot really argue with his parents and in a midnight committal hearing the proper green form is filled in and he’s let off. His half-Jewish Russian Communist friend is convicted and sent to prison, though. This secures his survival, because he must serve his sentence and cannot be released from jail on such a serious charge merely to be exterminated. In a world ruled by NAZI bureaucrats, it’s sometimes the bureaucracy and not Nazism that prevails.

The author goes on to serve as a “paratrooper” in the Luftwaffe. (To explain, because the author doesn’t: after the shockingly wasteful airborne invasion of Crete, German paratroopers were used as extra infantry and there were no more major airborne operations.) Apart from describing how he crossed the front line and surrendered to the US Army, persuading the American commander to advance and take his comrades prisoner rather than simply staying where he was and shelling the Germans to oblivion, the author tells us about his military service only to show how much he had in common with some of the defendants at the Auschwitz trial. And having been arrested and taken to court himself as a young man under the NAZIs, he finds it easy to imagine himself in the dock at the Auschwitz trial. Indeed, a policeman helpfully finds him a chair immediately behind the defendants, so he very nearly is in the dock!

It is a measure of how much the perceptions of the author and other Germans of the NAZIs, was shaped by the NAZI’s own lies, that he is surprised and baffled to find that most of the SS defendants at the Auschwitz trial are accountants and bureaucrats, much like his father and uncles. He had thought that the SS were all men of action, brutal superheroes. If you are talking about the Waffen (“armed”) SS that would be true. But the majority of SS men were in the Allgemeine (general) SS and they were indeed mostly bureaucrats: lawyers; economists; accountants; college administrators. Since 1945, Germans have not been encouraged to understand how the NAZI state actually functioned, and it was the Allgemeine SS who controlled government and industry for the NAZIs, both in Germany and in the occupied territories. I would recommend “The SS Officer’s Armchair” by Daniel Lee, which I have also reviewed, to any readers of The Broken House who want to understand how the SS supplied the Reich with vital administrative as well as military muscle. It is important that we all do understand the bureaucracy of genocide, because it is beginning to happen again in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia even as I write.

Horst Kruger writes with an unflinching pen which, at times leaves the reader gasping in awe at the blind alley Germany stumbled down in the 1930's and yet, at other times, his writing feels soaked in the straightforward and withering commentary of Albert Camus which encourages wry laughter at his observational humour.

The early chapters cover Kruger's youth, although he writes of a painfully provincial, lower-middle-class upbringing his insight is razor sharp and cuts to the heart of German conservatism. His catholic mother and protestant father are a mismatched couple and Kroger often mentions the drawn out ritualised meals where he feels as if the family are being controlled by puppet strings.

Into this staid family comes the first flutterings of a resurgent German pride. Although Kroger's family are not politicised (his mother, pointedly, tells him he must effuse support for Hitler when out of the house but it is not required in the home) he somehow is drawn into the armed forces and spends four years in the war. There is little coverage of this chapter of his life, we are thrown into the narrative of his service at the tail end of the war and the circumstances of his surrender.

The book then junmps forward almost 20 years, Kroger is now a journalist and he recounts his time spent covering the Auschwitz trials. Again this section reeks of Camus, the walls of time fall away and the single, diesmbodied voice of a witness pulls Kroger and the other participants of the trial back to that dark chapter or, the death dance, as Kroger calls it.

This book grips from the first page, to read of Germany's self-delusion with such unusual and unerring honesty is revelatory and the quality of the writing is first rate. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.