What were your main criteria in choosing the objects?
The criteria I set for myself were simple. Firstly, the items had to be tangible and extant – and so theoretically accessible to the reader. Of course, many of them are in private collections, but the point is that I did not want to use items that were completely destroyed, or lost, or underwater. I think this gives an immediacy to the selection.
I should add that there is one exception to that – the Blood Flag – which was last seen in 1945. However, I felt that its significance in the narrative of Nazism as a political religion warranted its inclusion – albeit in postcard form.
The second criterion was that the item not only had to be interesting in itself, it also had to enable a wider discussion – so, for instance, the Volksempfänger radio set can be used to introduce an investigation of the Nazis’ use of mass propaganda.
In this way, I hoped, I could produce something that was both accessible and yet informative.
I feel that one of your goals was to talk about parts of the history which are somehow under-represented in general narratives. Am I correct?
Absolutely. As I’ve said, most of the main aspects of the Third Reich – the War, the Holocaust, Hitler and so on – are rather well known, but there is much beside that which is misunderstood, or almost completely unknown, and this approach gives an excellent opportunity to shed some light on those less well-known areas.
Some things which may not be so obvious, less iconic, are some of the stories of social life in Nazi Germany, things which were used to 'sell' the regime to the masses.
Quite right. This is an area that I personally find fascinating – and have explored in my books before - that of everyday life for Germans under the Third Reich. How could it be, for instance, that many from that generation of Germans after 1945 could still have viewed their recent history in a positive light? We assume – perhaps extrapolating from the awful wartime experiences of occupied countries like Poland – that Nazi rule in Germany was solely oppressive; a rule based purely on fear and repression. But, in the case of Germany, this is inaccurate, however. We have to acknowledge that – for Germans at least - Nazi rule was more based on seduction than oppression. So this aspect is one that I have tried to bring out in the book – to explain how that seduction was carried out and perpetuated.
Heinrich Hoffmann's (Hitler's personal photographer) Leica IIIa camera