Search results for ""Author Louis Hagen""

When Louis Hagen returned to Berlin immediately after the war, having survived not only incarceration and torture in a German concentration camp but also the Battle of Arnhem, it was through a desire to see the great German eagle toppled, its talons drawn. The son of a wealthy Jewish banker, he had seen his family flee their home, and many of his relatives had died at the hands of the Third Reich. He wanted to understand the German people; why had so many welcomed the Nazi Party, and were they now humbled and wiser? Hagen interviewed nine people he had known before the war who represented a wide spectrum of German society. They were an SA officer, a businessman, a doctor, a socialite, a journalist, a professional soldier, an SS wife, a member of the Hitler Youth and a mischling, or half Jew. Four were Nazis, three were collaborators, and two were anti-Nazi. The very fact that none of these people was a high-ranking Nazi official or a survivor of the Holocaust provides an insight into the Third Reich that is a revelation even for those who know this period of history intimately. How could the Baroness sent to Theriesenstadt concentration camp hold salons for ex-Nazis after the war? Through the lives of nine ordinary Germans, tracing their experiences of Nazism from the first hopeful days until the horrors of the Russian occupation of Berlin, Louis Hagen provides a salutary and unforgettable record of the German people in the shadow of the swastika.

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Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, over nine days 1,400 were killed and more than 6,000 – about a third of them wounded – were captured. It was a bloody disaster. The remarkable Louis Hagen, an ‘enemy alien’ who had escaped to England having been imprisoned and tortured in a Nazi concentration camp as a boy just a few years earlier, was one of the minority who made it back. What makes this book so unforgettable is not only the breathtaking drama of the story itself, it is the unmistakable talent of the writer. The narrative was first published anonymously in 1945.45 years later at a dinner party in Germany, Louis Hagen met Major Winrich Behr, Adjutant to Field Marshal Model at Arnhem. Louis added his side of the story to add even more insight to the original work.

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England is my home, and if someone asks me what I am German, Norwegian, Jewish or British I answer, I'm an Englishman.'In 1934, aged just 16, Louis Hagen was sent to Lichtenberg concentration camp after being betrayed for an off-hand joke by a Nazi-sympathising family maid. Mercifully, his time there was cut short thanks to the intervention of a school friend's father, and he escaped to the UK soon after. The Life of Louis Hagen' follows his adventures across the globe and the characters he met along the way, from the founder of the NHS to a Nobel Prize winner to one of the earliest animated-film directors, all told in lively and unflinching detail.Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, 1,400 were killed and more than 6,000 were captured a bloody disaster in more ways than one. Arnhem Lift' is Hagen's breathtaking and frank account of what it was like in the air and on the ground, including his daring escape from the German Army by

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