Diary of a Man in Despair

Hailed as one of the most important works on the Hitler period, this is an astonishing, compelling, and unnerving portrait of life in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1944, from a man who nearly shot Hitler himself.
 
The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to approaching defeat, their travesty of traditional folkways in the name of the Volk, and the author’s own missed opportunity to shoot Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed it, “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period,” but a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing in a depraved world.