The SS Officer’s Armchair by Daniel Lee is a historical investigation uncovering the life of a mid level Nazi administrator.
Lee is set on the trail of Robert Greisinger by a bundle of documents that had been concealed in the seat of an armchair for 70 years. His searches trace Greisinger’s ancestry, his family, his career as a lawyer and his progression as an SS officer from Stuttgart to the Ukraine to Prague. Lee’s conversations with Greisinger’s daughters shed some light on the way the post war generations adopted collective amnesia in coming to terms with their parents’ actions during the Nazi era.
Despite his own personal connection to the history he is investigating, Lee manages to remain an objective chronicler of his subject and is surprisingly sympathetic to the two daughters. However he convincingly disproves the idea that Greisinger (or indeed any of the mid level officials) were not active and enthusiastic participants in the crimes of the Nazis. I was left shuddering at Greisinger’s pursuit of advancement and a comfortable life for his family at the expense of the thousands that he condemned to misery and death at the stroke of a pen. Throughout I had Hannah Arendt’s description of Eichmann’s trial “The Banality of Evil” in mind.
This is not pleasant reading but it is compelling.
5/5