The Broken House by Horst Krüger review – growing up under Hitler

A German former soldier recalls his childhood in a 1966 memoir that has a chilling lesson for our own era

Horst Kruger (1919-1999), a German journalist and writer, originally wrote this evocative memoir in 1966 after attending the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where 22 former SS camp guards and lower officials were brought to justice for their part in the deaths of more than a million people.

Looking round the courtroom, Kruger saw only ordinary men who had built a solid and respectable existence for themselves after the war, their appalling crimes forgotten until uncovered by a courageous state prosecutor, Fritz Bauer. Here for example was Wilhelm Boger, an upright, reliable bookkeeper", a man you could depend on, who readjusted to life, who was able to sleep at night and who certainly had colleagues and friends and a family". And yet, the court was told, apart from participating in countless selections, gassings, mass shootings and executions, he was personally responsible for holding a sixty-year-old cleric in the prisoners' kitchen under water until he was dead; shooting a Polish couple with three children with a pistol from a distance of about three metres; kicking to death the Polish general Dlugiszewski, who had been starved until he was practically a skeleton", and many other similar acts of sadism and brutality.