Jonathan Freedland grew up in a Jewish family in England where nothing German was allowed in the house, his maternal grandmother having been killed when the last German V-2 rocket of the war fell on London’s East End.
Raised on the assumption that “with just a handful of exceptions, Adolf Hitler found a universally willing accomplice in the German nation”, Freedland explains that, in reality, three million Germans were imprisoned for crimes of dissent during the 12 years of Nazi rule.
Here, Freedland examines one particular group of aristocratic Germans, including two countesses, a high-ranking foreign diplomat, a doctor, an intelligence officer and the widow of a former imperial minister and respected ambassador, who met regularly to bemoan the state of their nation and discuss its post-Nazi future. However, at one such meeting in September 1943, there was someone else at the table, a spy for the Gestapo.
Freedland skilfully introduces us to the main characters, who defied the Nazis for more than a decade, including Otto Kiep, Germany’s consul general in New York when Hitler rose to power in 1933. Having praised Albert Einstein at a high-profile public event and seemingly criticised his own nation, Kiep was soon ordered back to Germany to explain himself.
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Kiep’s fellow dissenters included Hanna Solf, the widow of the last foreign minister of imperial Germany, Countess Maria von Maltzan, who personally helped Jewish citizens to flee Germany, as well as former secretary of state at the treasury, Arthur Zarden.
Lined up against them was Leo Lange, a ruthless SS commander who pioneered the gas chamber before becoming the founding commandant of the first death camp. Now head of a special counterintelligence unit, Lange is desperate to root out those disloyal to the Reich and he recruits a young doctor to pose as a fellow dissident, with dire repercussions.
Freedland displays the forensic skills of a detective, allied to the penmanship of a thriller writer, as he recounts the events leading up to that fateful tea party, and its appalling consequences, including incarceration, torture and a very public trial before Germany’s hanging judge. We get a real understanding of these people’s lives and the motivations that drove them, as Freedland unveils a fascinating story of bravery and morality against overwhelming odds.
