The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich's Press Chief - Hardcover

Dietrich, Otto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602399727 ISBN 13: 9781602399723

Publisher: Skyhorse, 2010

Synopsis

Up to the last moment, his overwhelming, despotic authority aroused false hopes and deceived his people and his entourage. Only at the end, when I watched the inglorious collapse and the obstinacy of his final downfall, was I able suddenly to fit together the bits of mosaic I had been amassing for twelve years into a complete picture of his opaque and sphinx like personality. If my contemporaries fail to understand me, those who came after will surely profit from this account.” Otto Dietrich

When Otto Dietrich was invited in 1933 to become Adolf Hitler’s press chief, he accepted with the simple uncritical conviction that Adolf Hitler was a great man, dedicated to promoting peace and welfare for the German people. At the end of the war, imprisoned and disillusioned, Otto Dietrich sat down to write what he had seen and heard in twelve years of the closest association with Hitler, requesting that it be published after his death.

Dietrich’s role placed him in a privileged position. He was hired by Hitler in 1933, was his confidant until 1945, and he worked and clashed with Joseph Goebbels. His direct, personal experience of life at the heat of the Reich makes for compelling reading.

About this title

About the Author:

Otto Dietrich was the Third Reich’s press chief from 1933 to 1945. He was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in prison, where he wrote his memoirs. He died in 1952 at the age of fifty-five.

Roger Moorhouse is a leading expert on the Third Reich and is the author of Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots against the Führer.

From Booklist:

A member of Hitler's staff who monitored foreign press for the dictator, Dietrich began this memoir within months of Nazi Germany's defeat. The audience clearly on Dietrich's mind was the German people, to whom, as a Hitler associate, he felt obligated to offer an explanation of the author of their trauma in 1945. There are sound reasons why Dietrich's recollections (which were originally published in the 1950s; this is the first American edition) never became as well known as Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich (1970). Long on philosophy and anecdotes, Dietrich's narrative and factual utility to a historian would be limited. Nevertheless, his character observations accord with historian Ian Kershaw's biography and so may engage general interest in what Hitler's haunts and habits were like. Amid details about physical surroundings, Dietrich imparts the tedium of listening to Hitler's repetitive nocturnal monologues, from which palaver Dietrich theorizes a dual personality of superficial affability concealing aggressive willfulness. However postwar Germans reacted to Dietrich's portrait, his work shows present readers an insider's first-draft exegesis of Hitler. --Gilbert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1602399727
• ISBN 13: 9781602399723
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256