cover image In the Bunker with Hitler

In the Bunker with Hitler

Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, , trans. from the French by John Gilbert. . Pegasus, $24 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-933648-39-2

This intriguing wartime memoir by von Loringhoven (b. 1914), the personal assistant of Hitler's last two chiefs of staff, chronicles his experiences as a German soldier finding himself inside Nazi Germany's Führerbunker , the bunker that housed Hitler during the last half of WWII. “Unable to reconcile” himself with the “ultra-conservative, anti-Semitic views” of the National Socialist Party before the war, von Loringhoven decided against the legal profession because “every budding lawyer... [is] indoctrinated with Party ideology.” Instead, he joined the German army, believing (naïvely, as it became clear) that “the Army stood quite aloof from Party politics.” Von Loringhoven soon became enmeshed in the Nazi regime; as aide-de-camp to Gen. Hans Kreb, Hitler's personal adviser, von Loringhoven found himself within the crumbling, defeated world of the Führerbunker during the last months of the war. By war's end, the author says, he “had the disagreeable impression of having been used as fodder for the adventures of a charlatan.” Von Loringhoven's depiction of bunker life and of his own escape, permitted by Hitler himself, will interest those fascinated by WWII. Photos, maps. (Nov.)