I used to be Hitler’s neighbour: ‘If he’d recognized we had been Jewish, we’d were despatched to Dachau’

The odds had been in opposition to Edgar Feuchtwanger attaining the age of 100. He was once born on 28 September 1924 right into a time of poverty and political turmoil in post-first global battle Germany. He was once additionally born right into a Jewish circle of relatives in a society that was once about to show to National Socialism, an ideology that might in the end be accountable for the homicide of 6 million Jews. In 1929, when Feuchtwanger was once 5, one thing came about that made his lengthy existence much more not likely. He were given a brand new neighbour: Adolf Hitler.

In October that 12 months, Hitler moved into the grand second-floor flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16 in Munich. His earlier flat, at the different aspect of the Isar, the river that divides Munich, had transform too small. Munich to him was once the “Capital of the Movement”, a name he awarded the town formally in 1935. From 1929 on he lived in 9 rooms on this nook construction, with its lengthy balconies and baroque facade. His body of workers moved in with him, and, quickly, devotees and high-ranking SS officials had been flocking to the residences close by. Diagonally reverse, at Grillparzerstrasse 38, with an instantaneous view of Hitler’s flat, lived the Feuchtwanger circle of relatives.

Edgar Feuchtwanger, whom his oldsters known as Bürschi, grew up in a revered and rich circle of relatives that hired a chef and a nanny. His father, Ludwig, was once a writer and attorney; his mom, Erna, a pianist. Intellectuals of the early 20th century had been continuously out and in of the circle of relatives house: the creator Thomas Mann; the attorney Carl Schmitt, who later turned into a Nazi felony theorist and birthday celebration member. And, after all, Ludwig’s brother, and Edgar’s uncle, Lion Feuchtwanger, the writer of the novels Jew Süss and Success.

Hitler and the Feuchtwangers lived around the side road from each and every different for years – till the circle of relatives emigrated to England in 1939, simply sooner than the outbreak of the second one global battle. “Nowadays, I am perhaps the only living witness who saw and experienced Hitler directly and had some kind of contact with him,” says Feuchtwanger.

We are sitting in Feuchtwanger’s front room in his house close to Winchester in Hampshire. The solar shines in the course of the huge window, immediately directly to him, and he should be extremely heat in his go well with, entire with blouse and tie. He is of the technology that attire neatly for appointments like this, his daughter Antonia Cox tells me. Sitting at the settee, he doesn’t glance 100 years outdated. But he doesn’t pay attention so smartly any further, and wishes a strolling body to get round and a wheelchair for longer distances. Cox and her brother Adrian Feuchtwanger have warned me that he’ll wish to take common breaks all the way through our interview.

We communicate in German. The tales he tells me are a mix of his personal studies and the ones instructed to him via his oldsters. Some issues he not recalls. He has forgotten, for instance, that he stood in Hitler’s flat in Munich round 10 years in the past, however Cox is there to assist him out. The rental has been a police station since 1949, to stop it changing into a pilgrimage web site for outdated Nazis and neo-Nazis. Feuchtwanger visited it and appeared out in the course of the window on the flat the place his circle of relatives as soon as lived. Other issues he recalls very obviously. The years when he lived reverse Hitler are deeply embedded in his reminiscence. Twelve years in the past, with the French journalist Bertil Scali, he wrote the whole lot down in his e book Hitler, My Neighbour.

The Feuchtwangers first spotted that they’d a brand new neighbour as a result of one banal element: their morning supply of milk was once lacking. Hitler, the milkman defined to Edgar’s mom, had claimed maximum of it for himself. He possibly wanted it for his SS bodyguards.

As a five-year-old, did he even know who Hitler was once? “Well, I knew that this was a man who was not very – how should I put it?– well disposed towards us as Jews. He had already tried to come to power in Munich in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923,” says Feuchtwanger. On the night of 8 November, Hitler and his brownshirts stormed into the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, declared the federal government of the German Reich brushed aside and known as for revolution. The putsch failed. Hitler was once arrested, charged with excessive treason and sentenced to 5 years in jail in April 1924. He was once granted early free up on the finish of the 12 months, having began paintings on Mein Kampf.

In the Feuchtwanger family, Hitler was once spoken of as a “ridiculous figure” as a result of this failed coup, Feuchtwanger recalls. “People believed that Hitler was a temporary phenomenon,” he says. In specific, his uncle Lion wavered between feeling alarmed and last calm. In his satirical novel Success, which he printed in 1930, Lion portrays Hitler as a hysterical guy named Kutzner who tries to seduce the folks with nationalist concepts however in the end fails. “Although he regarded Hitler as very dangerous, he saw him as someone to be made fun of. Hitler was supposed to continue as a ridiculous figure and then he would somehow disappear from the scene,” Feuchtwanger says.

Did his father, Ludwig, urge Lion to not write this e book? “I don’t know whether he actually advised him against it, but he certainly didn’t want my uncle to put himself in even more danger. It was a matter of luck that Lion was on a reading tour in America when Hitler became Reich chancellor in 1933. Fortunately, the German ambassador there was not a Nazi. He realised immediately that my uncle couldn’t go back to Germany; he would have been killed.” Lion, who had additionally publicly mocked Mein Kampf, was once one of the crucial first to be stripped of his citizenship via the National Socialists, and his books had been banned and burned.

Soon, Feuchtwanger’s oldsters spoke of not anything however politics and the chance posed via Hitler. Did he really feel threatened, I ask. “Well, nobody actually knew that it would become so threatening until it really did. As a child, I grew up very sheltered.” Everything gave the impression quite risk free to him, Feuchtwanger says. Hitler and National Socialism remained an summary risk. He noticed Hitler’s silhouette within the flat reverse, because the vehicles drove up and chauffeured him to the Berghof, his residency close to Berchtesgaden. “Whenever I went to school, I had to pass the house of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where Hitler was often in the garden. He was lying in a deckchair. So it all seemed quite – how should I put it – normal and unthreatening.”

It was once in 1933, when Adolf Hitler had simply transform Reich chancellor, that Feuchtwanger met him head to head for the primary time. “Down from Prinzregentenplatz you could go out on to the meadows, get some fresh air, which was of course always important to the nannies. Once, when we were on our way, Hitler had just come out of his house. There was a car that he obviously wanted to get into and he saw that we had stopped to let him pass and he thanked us.” Until then, he had handiest ever observed him from a distance. Now he was once status in entrance of him. “He was actually just an ordinary person. There was nothing special about him,” Feuchtwanger says.

That was once the one time he met him up shut? “Yes, and he didn’t know who we were then. He just saw a woman with a small boy.” Hitler was once unaware that the boy was once Jewish; that he was once a Feuchtwanger, associated with Lion. What would have came about if he had recognized all this? “He would have done something. Without a doubt.” When I ask what he approach via “done something”, he replies: “I’m sure we would have been killed in Dachau.”

Feuchtwanger turns out drained at this level within the dialog. While he dozes, his son displays me photos from Feuchtwanger’s youth, the place he’s with buddies and dressed in lederhosen. All over the home are piles of books and folders with paperwork from his youth in Nazi Germany; circle of relatives footage and awards cling at the partitions. Next to Feuchtwanger is the German version of his newest e book, written with Cox, entitled Letters from a Child Exile (it’ll be printed in the United Kingdom in spring 2026). The e book compiles letters he wrote in 1939 to his oldsters from England whilst he waited for his or her arrival.

After a couple of mins Feuchtwanger tells me he’s able to proceed. In his memoir, I say, there may be the next quote from his father: “Right in front of his eyes we are safer. His genius is so great that he forgets to look out of the window.” As his neighbours, they had been hiding in undeniable sight. Feuchtwanger not recalls his father announcing this, he says, “but it was certainly not the intention to emigrate. My father was very connected to German culture. That was his life.”

As time went on, what Feuchtwanger noticed from his room on the second one surface modified. He had spotted how the counterdemonstrations had lowered, how other people now stopped in entrance of the Führer’s rental with their hands outstretched and shouted “Heil Hitler”, how the British top minister Neville Chamberlain came over. Chamberlain was once invited to Hitler’s non-public flat when they had signed the Munich settlement within the Führerbau, the construction that symbolised the Nazis’ energy, in conjunction with the Italian top minister, Benito Mussolini, and France’s top minister, Édouard Daladier.

The Feuchtwangers’ lives had been additionally converting. “We noticed that Hitler was a very clever man, the way he managed everything. It wasn’t good for us either,” says Feuchtwanger. While Hitler’s global was once rising, his was once shrinking.

After the Nuremberg race regulations had been enacted in 1935, the Feuchtwangers misplaced their body of workers and Edgar his nanny, as a result of Jews had been not allowed to be employers. They weren’t allowed to go into retail outlets. His father misplaced his task on the publishing space. Schoolmates grew to become in opposition to Edgar as a result of they didn’t need to be buddies with Jews.

As a kid, did he even realise the importance of being Jewish? “Jewishness didn’t play a big role in my life before the rise of National Socialism. It did in my father’s life, because my grandparents were Orthodox Jews. But by my time that had completely faded away. I didn’t know much about it,” he says. After Hitler got here to energy, the circle of relatives turned into extra mindful of it. “He turned it into something. And I didn’t really understand that. Back then, at primary school, I was like the other children at first. I went along with all the Nazi stuff. Have you seen my exercise books?”

He leans forwards and reaches for a worn pocket book. A couple of sheets nearly fall out. There is a big swastika at the first web page. He drew it himself when he was once about 8 years outdated. “The teacher’s name was Miss Weikl, and she was very pro-Nazi right from the start, I think. She gave us tasks as children.” She dictated poems, had the kids write birthday greetings to Hitler and make drawings of the “true” map of Germany, together with the areas that the trainer mentioned were taken clear of them. Did he ever query what he was once drawing? “No. I did what the teacher wanted me to, and my parents said: ‘Do what the teacher says.’” What did his oldsters say concerning the drawings? “Nothing. They didn’t want trouble; they didn’t want me to fight back.”

If his oldsters had believed till then that Hitler was once just a transient phenomenon, that they had been in all probability more secure residing correct below his nostril, they now realised that they had to flee. “The point where it became really dangerous was when Vom Rath was shot. My father knew straight away that this was going to be very serious.” The German diplomat Ernst vom Rath were killed in Paris on 7 November 1938 via a Jew. The assassination was once a part of the justification for what adopted. Two days later got here the November pogroms, once in a while referred to as Kristallnacht: synagogues had been set on hearth, Jewish retail outlets had been destroyed and looted, and Jews had been imprisoned in focus camps – amongst them Feuchtwanger’s father, Ludwig.

“They came in the evening and took him to the concentration camp in Dachau, half an hour away from Munich. Later, they seized his books – I remember that well. My mother tried everything to get him out of the camp,” says Feuchtwanger. Was he acutely aware of what focus camps had been again then? “Everyone knew that Dachau existed, that it could easily be deadly.” Deadly which means that folks had been shot? “Yes. It was winter and they had to stand still for hours. If a person fell down, he was usually killed. The Nazis wanted people to know that, so that they wouldn’t resist them.”

Six weeks handed, all the way through which Feuchtwanger’s mom known as a large number of workplaces, travelled to the Dachau focus camp herself and passed over some meals for her husband on the gate, on which was once written “Arbeit macht frei” as on many different focus camps. Then, all of sudden, Ludwig got here house. Feuchtwanger doesn’t know why he was once launched. But he recalls that his father appeared frighteningly skinny, that he needed to cross to mattress right away. “He was seriously weakened.”

As quickly as his father was once again on his ft, the circle of relatives began making arrangements for his or her departure. Many buddies, together with Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, to whom Edgar had incessantly delivered books on mortgage from Ludwig’s library, had lengthy since left Germany. With cash from Lion and different members of the family, they had been in a position to acquire a circle of relatives visa for England at a price of £1,000, an unlimited sum again then.

Two months handed sooner than Feuchtwanger boarded the educate in Munich. His father accompanied him so far as the Danish border, then travelled again to Munich, whilst Feuchtwanger were given on a ship to England. He was once 14 years outdated on the time. It was once an journey for him, he says. “The day I crossed the border was 19 February 1939 and it felt as if I had left an evil empire.”

In England, he stayed with a circle of relatives in Cornwall. He temporarily realized the language and were given a scholarship for varsity, however he fearful about his oldsters. The letters that Feuchtwanger wrote all the way through this time endure witness to this, corresponding to this one dated 28 February 1939: “Dr and Mrs Dyson, I repeat, are particularly nice people. But the other people are very nice too … Come as soon as possible. Until then, all the best, 1,000 kisses. Your Bürschi.”

He saved the whole lot; his mom, Erna, did, too. When I ask him whether or not he would describe the Feuchtwangers as a circle of relatives of creditors, he laughs. The previous fills the home. A replicate and a portray from the Munich flat cling within the eating room. In the penthouse, as Feuchtwanger jokingly calls the room above the storage, is the grand piano from Munich that he and his mom used to play. His oldsters packed the whole lot up after they fled, crammed two 5-metre-long shipping crates, and controlled to get permission to have them shipped to England.

Feuchtwanger’s oldsters arrived 3 months after him, and shortly moved to Winchester. But his father by no means felt comfy in England. “He was a fish out of water. He couldn’t do anything here. He couldn’t speak the language. After the war, he wanted to go back to Germany. My mother didn’t really want to; she’d had enough of Germany.” His father’s plans by no means turned into truth: he died in 1947. Lion Feuchtwanger by no means returned to Germany, both. He lived first in exile in France, till the Nazi invasion compelled him to escape. In 1941, he and his spouse emigrated to the USA, the place he died in 1958.

By distinction, Edgar temporarily felt at house in England. He studied historical past, won his doctorate at Cambridge and lectured on the University of Southampton. He and his spouse, Primrose, purchased a space in Winchester after their marriage in 1962, and it was once there they introduced up their 3 youngsters, Antonia, Adrian and Judith. He now has 3 grandchildren. Primrose died in 2012. Since then, he has lived on my own.

In his paintings as a historian, Feuchtwanger targeted to begin with on his new nation – the Victorian technology, Disraeli – and later at the nation of his previous – National Socialism and the Third Reich.

Did he ever need to return completely? “I made connections with the University of Frankfurt and was a visiting professor. But I didn’t want to move back. It was too far away from my life. I mean, English is my everyday language. I can speak German perfectly well, but normally I speak in English.” Is he nonetheless a Bavarian? “I am a Bavarian at heart. And I’m, wait, it says here somewhere …” He fumbles for his magnifying glass and opens a replica of his autobiography, searching for a quote from a pal. “It says here: an honorary Englishman – that’s what I am.”

The affirmation of this, the OBE awarded via the then Prince Charles at Windsor Castle in 2021, dangles from his go well with. It was once given for his contribution to Anglo-German members of the family. He additionally gained the German Federal Cross of Merit in 2003.

Looking again, he considers himself fortunate. “I’m still here at over 100 years old, while most of them are gone. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, they were all wiped out.” He laughs. As for his recommendations on attaining such an excellent age, he by no means smoked, he says.

Is he a courageous particular person, I ask. “A what?” I talk louder. He laughs and says right away: “No, no, no!” His e book tells the tale of the way in 1930 six-year-old Edgar and his half-sister, who was once visiting from Switzerland, went to look whether or not the nameplate via the doorbell mentioned Hitler. It didn’t. The title written there was once Winter, the Führer’s housekeeper. Quite courageous, I say. And travelling on my own to England – that was once additionally slightly courageous. “I had to go along with it. Even back then, when my father accompanied me on my escape to the border, the SS people came on the train and said to my father: ‘Why don’t you escape, too?’ And my father told them: ‘I’ll prepare everything.’ He left the train and I was just driven on. Of course, it was shocking. But there was nothing else I could do.”

So, he’s sticking with out a? “Absolutely. I’m a person who goes along with everything. I take it as it comes. I don’t fight against what I can’t change. I know I don’t make the world turn; it turns without me.”

He stays made up our minds to talk as a modern witness about the upward thrust of the Nazi technology. “It was a good thing that I wrote my memoirs when I did. I couldn’t do it now.”

More than a decade has handed since he printed his e book about being Hitler’s neighbour. That was once a totally other political time, I say. Western democracies have skilled a shift to the best, and the upward thrust of populism. In Germany, the far-right AfD turned into the second-largest birthday celebration within the contemporary federal elections. “It’s very unpleasant that something like this is rising again in Germany,” Feuchtwanger says. “You look at it with fear.”