His profiles of prominent Nazis in The Face of the Third Reich (1963), his first success and a groundbreaking work for that time, could have come straight from the pages of Dostoevsky as Fest probes in scintillating style the dysfunctional psyches, personal ambitions, contradictions and self-serving delusions of the men who helped create the Third Reich, while showing how they embodied the attitudes of their classes. His father's integrity became the standard Fest used to measure the psychological weakness and moral prevarications of his countrymen in a lifelong quest to explain how they could have descended into the madness of the Holocaust. Johannes maintained that 'one does not volunteer for Hitler's criminal war' and that conscription was preferable after spending time as a prisoner of war in France, Joachim revisited the subject with his father: 'You weren't wrong,' the older man allowed him, 'But I was the one who was right.'

We are not little people in such matters,' Johannes, a devout Catholic, had replied Joachim later recalled seeing him come home covered in blood after fighting street battles with Nazi Brown Shirts.Īt his father's insistence, Fest did not join the Hitler Youth, but in 1944 volunteered for the army to avoid conscription into the Waffen SS. Only last month Fest hit the headlines when he accused Noble prizewinner Günter Grass of double standards for criticising German society for failing to deal adequately with its Nazi past while keeping secret his own membership of the Waffen SS.Īt the age of nine Joachim recalled hearing a row in which his mother pleaded with his father to become a party member, arguing that a little hypocrisy was justified to ease the hardship the family was undergoing.

His combination of strong narrative and psychological insight produced best-sellers, and Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, published in 2004, provided the basis, along with the writings of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, for the film Der Untergang (Downfall) the same year. Though Fest often maintained that he would have been happier studying the Italian Renaissance, he felt compelled to confront the great issues of German life that he had been launched into from the start - above all, that of individual choice under a totalitarian regime. Most notable among the several books Fest wrote on the Nazi era, from a conservative, Catholic perspective but with considerable journalistic flair, was an authoritative biography of the dictator. Joachim Fest: The work of the German historian and editor Joachim Fest, who has died at the age of 79, was shaped till its end by Adolf Hitler's rise to power during his childhood.

Inside Hitler's Bunker by Joachim Fest