API’S BERLIN DIARIES My Quest to Understand My Grandfather’s Nazi Past

Publisher: She Writes Press Web: www.shewritespress.com ISBN: 978-1-64742-003-1 Softback: 325 pages

RRP: $16.95 (USD)

Gabrielle Robinson is a German-born, American and British-educated retired university teacher. Her father, Kurt Hevler, died in 1943 when she was a baby: shot down near Bexhill-on-sea, coming fairly close to killing the mother of the editor of Iron Cross magazine in the process of the raid he was participating in. He is buried in Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery

By the age of two-and-a-half she had been bombed out of her Berlin flat twice and was largely brought up by her eyesurgeon grandfather, ‘Api’, until his death in 1955.

When her mother died, she discovered his diary and learned her grandfather had been a member of the Nazi Party. How was she to reconcile that Nazi ‘Api’ with the man she had loved so tenderly?

The NSDAP or Nazi Party had eight million members in 1945. Membership was

almost indispensable for certain professions, including teaching, medicine, and law. Many associated with the extermination of the Jews were Party members, but many were not. Quite a few of those involved with the opposition to Hitler were members too. You needed to be a member to work for the regime, and if you wanted to keep your hands clean there was only ‘inner emigration’. In other words, staying at home

and avoiding all contact with the authorities.

‘Api’ joined the party on 1 May 1933. He probably wanted security. It was the time when his Jewish colleagues were being dismissed from hospital jobs and applications for membership were closed soon after, not being reopened for several years.

When about a third of the doctors were fired from the Charité Hospital where he worked, ‘Api’s’ fortunes increased by the same amount; but he did not work in the camps, neither did he carry out experiments on Jews or POWS. To all intents and purposes, he remained a hardworking God-fearing Prussian doctor. His only crime was to collaborate with the regime in power.

Gabrielle’s book provides a valuable glimpse of the fraught life of an ex-nazi in occupied Germany, and how he was received in the different Allied Zones.

In May 1949 ‘Api’ was ‘exonerated’ and life returned to some normality.

An excellent read for those wishing to better understand laspects of life inside Nazi Germany.

A riveting account. Reviewed by Giles Macdonogh

Illustrations: ✔. References/notes: ✔. Appendices: ✔. Index: ✔.