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