Book Review of The Broken House by Horst Kruger

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(Based on a free review .pdf of the English translation by Shaun Whiteside, from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk)

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.

The Broken House by Horst Kruger is published in the UK by Bodley Head on the 17^th of June 2021