Last Train From Berlin

An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War.

Now with a new introduction and a selection of his previously unpublished photographs, Howard K Smith, one of America's most distinguished correspondents, tells the story of his years as a young reporter in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power and for the first two years of the Second World War. Finally granted a visa to leave the country on, coincidentally, December 7th 1941, he was freed to write everything - and more - that the censors had forbidden.

This is his eyewitness account describing the physical, emotional and psychological manipulation of the German people by Hitler, Goebbels and their lackeys. His personal experiences as a journalist under increasingly difficult circumstances are extraordinary enough, but his observations at close hand of the German high command, and particularly of Hitler himself, are frightening and profound.

We see an increasingly disillusioned German people, forced to join the war; their children forced into Nazi youth groups; continually lied to (being told, for instance, that the war with Russia was over in a few days; that England was on the verge of seeking peace terms in July, 1940) while falling ever more firmly under the control of the Nazi machine. The pernicious effect of Nazism on Smith's own close German friends makes particularly disturbing reading.

Reading like real-life thriller, this unique account of the rise and rise of Hitler acted as a clarion call to England and America when it was first published in 1942.