In 1936, the year Fritz Schwalm was born, Adolph Hitler had high approval ratings. Fritz’s parents supported the national socialist state, and his father was an SS officer employed in the Race and Settlement Office (Rasse and Siedlungs Hauptamt, RuSHA).

The office became the focus of a military tribunal of the Nuremberg trials, and his father was sentenced to ten years in prison. Decades later, after his father’s death, Fritz discovered his diaries, penned during the first four years in captivity that included the trial.

In a fascinating memoir, Fritz begins by sharing his father’s journals that detail his thoughts about Germany’s successes and failures under the Hitler regime, beginning with his internment in a camp near Hamburg, Neuengamme. In the following section, Fritz chronicles his own life growing up under the Nazi regime.

After revealing how the defeat of Germany in 1945 and its consequences confronted him with traditional political and social norms, he leads others through the events of his subsequent life, rich in adventures and free choices, stark contrasts of what his life would have been in a society governed by rigid social norms and ideological biases. A Life Outside My Father’s Shadow shares the contrasting perspectives and views of a German SS officer father and his son as the events of a brutal war transformed the world.

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