Nazism from a young German’s 1939 point of view.
Sebastian Haffner’s bestseller “Defying Hitler”, written in 1939 and published posthumously in 1999 has been translated into English. Gabriel Schonfeld reviews it for the New York Times Book Review.

Haffner tells of the rise of Nazism in Germany from the viewpoint of a young German coming of age in Berlin. The book, which was never meant to be published, appears to challenge present-day historians’ claims regarding what the Nazis had in store for the Jews. “Nazi anti-Semitism was something else; if anything, it tended to alarm rather than attract the masses. This is hardly to say that it was not central to the Nazi program. It was. And it came complete with a determination, fully visible to Haffner already in the late 1930's, to ''exterminate'' the Jews, ''an intention they made no secret of.'' These words are all the more remarkable when one considers how many historians continue to insist today that the Nazi genocide was conceived only after the experience of total war had ''radicalized'' Hitler and his henchmen”.