Joachim Fest: The work of the German historian and editor Joachim Fest, who has died at the age of 79, was shaped till its end by Adolf Hitler's rise to power during his childhood. Most notable among the several books Fest wrote on the Nazi era, from a conservative, Catholic perspective but with considerable journalistic flair, was an authoritative biography of the dictator.
Though Fest often maintained that he would have been happier studying the Italian Renaissance, he felt compelled to confront the great issues of German life that he had been launched into from the start - above all, that of individual choice under a totalitarian regime.
His combination of strong narrative and psychological insight produced best-sellers, and Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, published in 2004, provided the basis, along with the writings of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, for the film Der Untergang (Downfall) the same year.
Only last month Fest hit the headlines when he accused Noble prizewinner Günter Grass of double standards for criticising German society for failing to deal adequately with its Nazi past while keeping secret his own membership of the Waffen SS.
Inspired by his father Johannes's resistance to the Nazis, Fest became convinced that responsibility for the emergence of the Third Reich lay with the millions of Germans who actively supported or turned a blind eye to Hitler's regime. Examination of the question will continue with the publication of Fest's own memoirs, Ich Nicht (Not Me) - his father's statement of defiance - later this month.
The plight of the "little people" caught up in brutal events engineered by others was a central feature of Fest's upbringing. He was born in Berlin, and in 1933 his father lost his job as a schoolteacher because he refused to join the Nazi party.
At the age of nine Joachim recalled hearing a row in which his mother pleaded with his father to become a party member, arguing that a little hypocrisy was justified to ease the hardship the family was undergoing. "Everyone else might join, but not me . . .We are not little people in such matters," Johannes, a devout Catholic, had replied; Joachim later recalled seeing him come home covered in blood after fighting street battles with Nazi Brown Shirts.
At his father's insistence, Fest did not join the Hitler Youth, but in 1944 volunteered for the army to avoid conscription into the Waffen SS.
Johannes maintained that "one does not volunteer for Hitler's criminal war" and that conscription was preferable; after spending time as a prisoner of war in France, Joachim revisited the subject with his father: "You weren't wrong," the older man allowed him, "But I was the one who was right."
His father's integrity became the standard Fest used to measure the psychological weakness and moral prevarications of his countrymen in a lifelong quest to explain how they could have descended into the madness of the Holocaust. His profiles of prominent Nazis in The Face of the Third Reich (1963), his first success and a groundbreaking work for that time, could have come straight from the pages of Dostoevsky as Fest probes in scintillating style the dysfunctional psyches, personal ambitions, contradictions and self-serving delusions of the men who helped create the Third Reich, while showing how they embodied the attitudes of their classes. Hitler (1973) broke new ground by focusing on a psychological exploration of the Nazi leader who, Fest said, operated like "a reptile", outside established moral norms.
Speer: the Final Verdict (1999), written after the emergence of new evidence of Albert Speer's entanglement with the Nazi murder machine, is a masterly study in the psychological mechanisms of guilt and concealment. Fest concluded that Speer, Hitler's chief architect and later armaments minister - who, like his master, saw himself as an artist above all norms - did not have the moral or religious standards needed to tell the difference between good and evil, but was absorbed with technical questions of how to accomplish his aims.
Speer had given his own account, with Fest's assistance, in Inside the Third Reich (1970) and Spandau: the Secret Diaries (1976).
After the war, Fest studied history, sociology, German literature, art history and law at Freiburg, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin universities, and joined the youth arm of the conservative Christian Democratic Union. His first job was in radio, as head of contemporary history with RIAS Berlin (1954-61), after which he moved to television as editor-in-chief of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk. From 1973 to 1993, he was co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the head of its culture section.
In 1986 he approved the publication of an article by the revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, who compared the Holocaust to Stalin's mass murder, triggering a bitter debate about the treatment of the Nazi period by German historians. Later, Fest distanced himself from Nolte, but continued to defend Nolte's right to put forward his views.
An outspoken individualist difficult to label, Fest accused film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder of being anti-Nazi only out of conformity to left-wing ideology, but he was good friends with Ulrike Meinhof, the Red Army Faction terrorist, later recalling the heated political debates he had enjoyed with her at parties. The brilliant, lively, gracious Fest was a tireless critic of contemporary German society, accusing it of failing to establish clearer values as a safeguard against the emergence of another Hitler. His wife and two sons survive him.
Joachim Fest: born December 8th, 1926; died September 11th, 2006