Translated by Wilfrid David
Introduction by Neal Ascherson

Immediately after Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland on 11 September 1939, a young émigré German lawyer in London set aside his autobiography in order to write – as his then publisher put it – something less private and more political. The result was Germany: Jekyll and Hyde – a book which, in the words of its foreword, aimed to provide ‘the propaganda ministries of the Western Powers with certain essential data, which they seem to lack, concerning the German public’.

The Times Literary Supplement called this book ‘one of the shrewdest diagnoses of German mentality and Nazi moods that we have seen’. It combines urgency with patient, reasoned analysis, and occasional sardonic humour, to take the political and human measure of the immeasurable.

The author had completed his legal qualifications in Germany after the Nazi take-over but had mainly earned his living by writing articles for the few remaining independent-minded editors. In autumn 1938 he had to leave Germany clandestinely because he was engaged to a Jewish woman (a criminal offence under the Nazi racial laws).

Such background and experience gave Haffner, who settled in England, an ideal vantage point from which to enlighten the British on what had happened in Germany since 1933, why it had happened, and how. Organized by subject-matter and chronology, it proceeds through analysis of the Nazi leadership and the Nazi Party, to Germany’s other political parties, and on to the various constituent parts of the German body politic – those loyal to Hitler, those neutral or wavering, and those in opposition or resistance – including the often equally disunited émigrés.

Haffner’s book was written during the so-called phoney war, when – apart from engagements at sea – all appeared to be non-belligerent; discussions of peace with Hitler were even in the air. For this reason, when this book came out in June 1940, after Dunkirk and after the desperate battle for France had been lost, its rigorous, hard-hitting and relentlessly militant stance was widely greeted and acclaimed. The new prime minister Winston Churchill was said to have been so impressed that he insisted his whole Cabinet read the book.

Germany: Jekyll and Hyde was one of the last works to be written about Nazi Germany before the Holocaust, which has understandably – but often misleadingly – governed our image and comprehension of the Second World War. In this sixtieth anniversary year of that war’s end, this book preserves a unique historical record of what Britain and her allies, including the German émigrés, were opposing in ‘their finest hour’, at its beginning.

Published by Libris in 2005