While imprisoned at Nuremberg, Schirach went to great lengths to distance himself from the horrors of the Nazis. But in truth he had lived the high life as one of their most senior members, marrying Henriette, the beautiful daughter of Hitler’s great friend Heinrich Hoffman. In her memoir, Henriette recalled the heady days when he ran the Hitler Youth: ‘On Baldur’s birthday, the house was besieged by members of the BDM, the Nazi Girls’ Association, who came with flags and flutes to bring their gifts – plovers’ eggs and live geese, or once, an outsize nutcracker from Sonneberg, together with a pair of hand-knitted gloves from Saxony, one embroidered with the word Heil, and the other with Hitler.’ But after the war, Schirach would try to excuse his devotion to the Führer by saying ‘Before 1934, Hitler was human; from 1934 to 1938, he was superhuman, from 1938 onwards he was inhuman.’ Schirach, who had been responsible for sending thousands of Viennese Jews to the death camps, was convicted of crimes against humanity but was spared the rope and served twenty years in Spandau Prison. Henriette divorced him. Two years after his release he gave a fascinating but gruesomely self-serving TV interview to David Frost, which you can find on YouTube. He also published his memoirs and lived out his days in comfort, dying aged 67 in 1974.

KURT DIEBNER

Nuclear physicist

Having studied experimental physics in Innsbruck and Halle as a young man, he went on to join the Nazi party and, in the war, headed Germany’s nuclear energy project. Despite the Allies’ fears, this actually never came close to developing an atomic bomb. Diebner later claimed that he had never voted for Hitler and that he actually ‘suffered under the Nazis’. He said the only reason he stayed in the party was that science jobs were restricted to Nazis. Along with nine other scientists detained at Farm Hall, Huntingdonshire, after the war, he was released on January 3rd, 1946, and returned to Germany. He worked in private industry in Hamburg, trying to develop nuclear-powered merchant ships. He died in 1964, aged 59.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my wife, Naomi, who had to put up with even more of me during the writing of this book, because of lockdown. Thanks to all at Bonnier Zaffre – particularly my editor Ben Willis, art director Nick Stearn, the sales and marketing teams, my publicist Clare Kelly and editorial assistant Ciara Corrigan – for keeping calm and carrying on in tough times. And thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, the voice of sanity and good humour at all times.

About the Author

About the Author