Hitler's Last Courier

Rating:
Summary: Very personal account of a life & how you can always change
Review: What an account of a life.
Or more precisely, what a life to tell this story.
The book seems to have been written only recently, in the new millenium, about events which happened more than 50, 60 years ago.
It was fascinating to get the detailed and personal account of somebody who is a contemporary in this 21st Century, in the day and age of 9-11 and the Afghanistan war, of an era, which for almost all of us is only found in history books. Or in books like these.
In this book we see that history tends to repeat itself in very unforeseeable ways.
How else could the account of the years before 1945 (where Mr. Lehmann was a 16 year old serving in the final days in the bunker of THAT most evil person of the 20th century) sound so familiar to the articles and accounts I read about the brainwashing "religious" schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the beginning of the 21st Century.
Obviously many things seem different now than then, but the methods are strikingly similar: Teaching children the very wrong things will make these children into a deeply hating crwod, before at least some of them(hopefully) start to think by themselves, as Mr. Lehmann did at some point in the last days in the shattered Berlin of 1945 and even more after the war, when he emigrated from Germany to ... America.
Reading this book is a personal history lesson, describing the detailed step-by-step daily indoctrination increment, where the results ends up being sadly foreseeable: A manipulated 16-year old, happily willing (at that time) to die for the Führer.

Rating:
Summary: pleasure to read
Review: You would -very much- enjoy this book for the following reasons:
* It is very informative. It is a social analysis of the Nazi Germany. You come to understand everyday life in Germany and how they (especially the younger ones) were indoctrinated, why they supported Hitler, even in the desperate final days. "We were willing to forgo our lives, as a sacrifice for Fuehrer and fatherland". "In the great scheme of things, we had been taught, our individual lives belonged to the nation. Not for us to live on, but for the nation to survive".
* It is an easy read. The book was divided into many chapters.
* Well-written. It reads almost like a novel. Other than the historical information, the auther writes about his personal experiences which are not related to history that's being written around him, like the chapter "love and lust". These personal stories don't take away from the book or become a distraction; they add literary beauty.
Overall, very good book.