1933

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Germany in the first year of Nazi rule is the setting for this evocation of a period of gathering terror. Unlike most of the recent spate of single-year books, this is not an account of public events. Rather it focuses on five people: U.S. Ambassador William Dodd; his daughter Martha; Jewish society reporter Bella Fromm; Putzie Hanfstaengl, chief of the foreign press; and Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo. Drawing on their own accounts, on newspaper reports, and on archival sources, Metcalfe conveys a vivid sense of a society going awry and of jarring incongruity between the normality of everyday life and the new stark violence.