Review: The Perfect Nazi – Martin Davidson

In The Perfect Nazi, Martin Davidson joins quite a long line of authors who have written about the Nazi past of their relatives. Perhaps the best book in the genre is The Himmler Brothers, by Katrin Himmler – a difficult book to surpass in view of the noteriety of the author’s grand-uncle and grandfather. But Wibke Bruhns (My Father’s Country) also scores in that her father was an SS officer who was executed for his part in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944. However, Davidson is the commissioning editor for history for the BBC and as the cover tells us, has two degrees from Oxford University so readers presumably may expect something worthwhile in his book.

We are on undramatic ground with The Perfect Nazi.  Martin Davidson’s maternal grandfather, Bruno Langbehn was an SS officer but did not rise to great prominence, his only significance perhaps being that he was committed to the Nazi party from its inception.  ”Bruno”, as the author refers to him throughout the book, was far from being a glamorous figure, being an artisan dentist by profession, and fairly clueless about his work for the SS.  Indeed, the final chapters of the book quote an official document which, the author tells us, provides little more than “a damning portrait of Bruno’s incompetence, his manifest self-importance and his blindness to the futility of the work itself”. It is therefore obvious from the start that this book is not going to provide any great new insights into the operation of the SS or the inner workings of the Nazi Party.

This book is not without its problems, the main one being the paucity of the source material. Davidson has some teenage memories of his grandfather. His grandmother and her sister seemed to be reluctant to talk about the war and events leading up to it, and it was only Bruno’s second wife who seemed able to provide useful personal reminiscences. The documentation of Bruno’s life seems very scant, consisting of a list of names from an SS directory containing a one line entry for Bruno, and also a set of twenty-five pages of personnel records, most of it badly burned and virtually illegible. The most significant find was a bundle of documents connected to Bruno’s application to join the SS, including Bruno’s lebenslauf (a hand-written CV), which sought to persuade the SS to take him on.

With so little original material to go on, Davidson is forced to make much of very little.  For example, when his cousin gives him a 1942 Berlin telephone directory, containing a one-line entry for Bruno, he writes,

The documents sheer ordinariness made it oddly compelling.  By their very nature phone books are as utilitarian as it is possible for a book to be. And yet how much information they contain.  Bruno’s entry shares the same elements as all the others – name, job title, area he lived in, address and phone numbers. What is so striking reading the page is how pristine, modern and untouched by war Berlin seems to be. A crisp list of names, addresses and telephone numbers depicts a city completely at odds with the burned out husk destroyed by three years of bombing and Russian artillery shells.

This “meditation on a phone book” may be significant for Martin Davidson but it makes for dull reading and is perhaps symptomatic of the smallness of this story.

With such a small amount of material to go on, Davidson falls back on recounting the rise of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler and making assumptions that Bruno took a full part in the many events that supported it.  For example, when dealing with the suppression of political opposition in the years 1933-37, Davidson goes to great lengths to describe the street-fighting and brawling that took place, but writes, “There are no records to tell us what role Bruno specifically played in all this . . . but as horrible as it was for me to picture Bruno in one of those cellars, holding somebody down or wielding a truncheon, it was entirely consistent with what I now knew about SA activities in Berlin”.

The bulk of this book could be summarised as a German history during the 20th century.  This is well-trodden ground and Davidson works hard to place his grandfather at its centre -

• “Shortly after Goebbels arrival in November 1926, Bruno, alongside Berlin’s few hundred other Nazis, found themselves summoned to Party headquarters to be harangued by their new city boss”.
• “Bruno was part of a drunken, seething crowd that had been worked up to a frenzy before Goebbels took to the stage”
• “For Bruno, the Great Depression was the miracle that the Nazis had been looking for”
• “.  . . in spring 1931 it erupted in the single biggest rebellion Hitler ever faced, and Bruno was caught up in the middle of it”
• “(Heinrich Kuhr) had a prickly and agressive streak that made him deeply unpopular with his men, Bruno included”
• “Bruno the political Nazi was busy as Bruno the storm-trooper, elaborating strategy, attending meetings, distributing leaflets and tirelessly hectoring potential voters.”

These statements, and countless others may well be true, but one would expect them to be backed up by a diary entry or other documentation rather than “because he could have, he probably did”.  This simply isn’t good enough for a work that purports to be history.

Sometimes, Davidson quotes a real source and places it so close to Bruno’s name that it at first you almost think that he is quoting his grandfather.  There are many examples of this, even in the footnotes. For example, we read on page 281, note 46:

The SA were, needless to say, in the thick of it, as described by one driven to a state of elated exhaustion, outlining what for Bruno must have become a regular experience: “prior to the elections we did not get to see our beds for two weeks.  Every night we put up posters and guarded them and tore off those of the enemies . . .

It is only a dozen or so lines later that we read “Quoted by Merkl, Political Violence” and realise that once more, these are not actually the words of Bruno but of an anonymous other.

This tactic which is used to beef up a very thin account of his grandfather’s part in the Nazi party becomes quite wearing.  Davidson so often quotes genuine sources in juxtaposition to references to Bruno that I kept having to remind myself that this is NOT Bruno at all, but someone else.

Davidson sometimes takes off into greater flights of fancy, such as imagining his grandfather attending the premiere of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Now -

As Bruno was a senior party member and had actually attended the rally, it is safe to assume there was little chance he missed seeing the film.  As the lights dimmed he knew he was about to savour the greatest cinema experience of his Nazi life . . . I can only imagine with what kind of exultant swagger Bruno left the cinema.  Of course, as exhilarating as he found the film , it merely symbolised all he already knew.

There is so much of this stuff -

“Bruno had been a vociferous and energetic participant in the Nazi struggle for eight long years. His every effort had been directed towards this outcome and he had never flinched from the agresson and sacrifices it had demanded”.

When I read about Bruno’s part in Kristallnacht I wanted to call out to the author, MAYBE, but you don’t KNOW this.  Its all surmise and assumption.  This is not history unless you can document it!  Its really not good enough to say:

It is hard to suppose that Bruno, now an SS officer, hadn’t been drinking with his Kameraden in the familiar Sturmlokal, the Zur Aldstadt, or that he later consciously boycotted the night’s actions, when so many of those had had known, and fought with for over a decade, poured out of the pubs, armed with sledgehammers and cans of petrol.  I will never know whether he chose this of all nights to stay at home and break the habit of a lifetime by refraining from participating in the largest outbreak of anti-Semitism.

Really, this isn’t history at all.  Its mere surmise and I wonder what the point is of writing it, when there are so many first hand accounts of the events of the night which do not rely on assuming that someone participated in it.  Heck, for all we know Bruno was out of action on Kristallnacht attending an SS officer’s dental emergency.  It may be a good exercise in creative writing to imagine what Bruno got up to on that night but it doesn’t shed any new light on the real events that took place.

I am going to have to draw this review to a close.  I see very little merit is rehashing the history of Nazism in Germany and inserting the name of a relative at all the key points. No doubt this is fascinating history for Martin Davidson and his relatives but I can’t see that it would have much interest beyond the confines of his family.  I agree with Martin Davidson that his grandfather probably took part in many of the events described but I would prefer to read the many genuine, first hand accounts. And for a history of the times, there are so many better books its hard to see what the point is in this one.

Note:  In the same month, Penguin also published Bomber County by Daniel Swift, another book about the wartime experiences of a grandfather.  I highly recommended this book in my review.  For a completely different take on Nazi experiences I would recommend My Friend the Enemy by Paul Briscoe, about an English boy who was stranded in German on the outbreak of war and was adopted by a German family.  Now, that’s a real story to tell.

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