I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley!

I like the contrast of the colors between the title and cover art on the book.
I honestly still am unsure about how I really feel about the book. It's a history b ook, which isn't my normal type of read. However, the topic did intrigue me.
It was well-written, but I have to admit it was slightly boring at times and difficult to push through.
Overall, It was a solid read, and I'm sure others who are interested in history will enjoy this more than I.

I am so happy that the person that was repairing the armchair contacted WWII historian Daniel Lee about the papers that were found. Some may have just set it aside and kept working. What a fun research project he was sent on. You often have to wonder how many other former SS officers/soldiers flew under the radar once the war was over and went about their lives escaping punishment.
This is a well researched book. Daniel Lee has done a great job showing us the story -and uncovering who Dr. Robert Griesinger was.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley - all thoughts are my own.

This is an intriguing story and a very well-researched non-fiction book pertaining to an "ordinary Nazi." I liked Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men," so when I saw this book I was immediately interested in it, as it tells the story of one such man.

Watching the story unfold from the documents discovered inside the chair to the end results after much travelling and many different visits to archives, family members, and other resources, the author tells quite the story about the life of the main character. It was exciting to see history come to life in such a way that someone who was not a major player in the Nazi party could still be traced and details that even the immediate family didn't know come to light.

This is not a dry and boring historical account, but rather one that leaves the reader curious to know further details about this man and others like him. It has also made me wonder how many other documents have been lost to the years because they were hidden in such a place and then tossed away when they were discovered. I was happy that the author took the time to explore this discovery further and share his results in this book.

This is the kind of book that anyone interested in this period of history will want to read. I highly recommend it.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

#NetGalley

Interesting chronicle of the life of an S. S. Officer who at first glance was thought to be a simple civil servant during wartime Germany. Digging deeper into his life through family contacts and extensive research in archives and similar places, the author uncovers a much more Nazi-connected man than previously imagined. Recommend this to those interested in World War II histories.

Daniel Lee, a historian of World War II, was contacted when a woman discovered many decades-old documents in a chair she was having reupholstered. The documents were all marked with swastikas and seemingly belonged to a Robert Griesinger, who had lived in Prague during the war. The woman had bought the chair at a second-hand shop in Prague almost 25 years after the war and didn’t discover the document cache until decades later.

Lee was intrigued and discovered that Griesinger was a lawyer who belonged to the SS, was in active military service until wounded in 1941, and then was sent to work a desk job in Prague. Lee also learned that his two daughters were still alive. They were only five and eight years old at the war’s end, though, and had little to contribute to Lee’s understanding of Griesinger. Lee decided that he wanted to find out all he could about Griesinger, the kind of low-level functionary you rarely read about.

Lee’s research is exhaustive, and he compiles a great deal of detailed information about Griesinger’s family, youth, academic career, career with the SS, and the societal influences he grew up with. His descriptions of the social and fraternal aspects of the SS, are illuminating. He is unable to get much information at all about Griesinger’s personal views on politics and the Nazis’ murderous racial policies, but it is clear that Griesinger was aware of the Nazis’ brutality and that he was involved in the abuse of Czech citizens.

Lee finds, to his shock, that during Griesinger’s short time in active service with the Wehrmacht, he was in a unit that, together with one of the Nazis’ infamous Einsatzgruppen, went through the shtetl where Lee’s Jewish relatives lived. They didn’t survive their encounter with the Nazis. Lee wasn’t able to find any evidence that Griesinger was involved in any of the civilian killing squad’s actions, but it was not uncommon for the Wehrmacht to at least coordinate with Einsatzgruppen.

Lee speculates quite a bit in the book, though with some basis, but his attempts at amateur psychology are not persuasive. Without evidence, he states as fact that Robert Griesinger “inherited an ease with brutally racist attitudes and practices” from his father and grandmother because they had lived in New Orleans (before returning to Germany) and would have been familiar with slavery and Reconstruction-era white supremacist violence. He also makes a strained connection between the armchair of the title and “the antebellum furniture of his youth.” The book would be improved if Lee excised these bits and stuck to history.

Ultimately, what this book reveals about Griesinger is what history shows about pretty much every Nazi I’ve ever read about, including each of those in Hitler’s inner circle: A greedy and envious man whose ambitions outstripped his abilities. He latched on to Nazism because it fed his delusion that his lack of success was the fault of the current system and the “other,” and the party would give him an opportunity to rise. So Griesinger ended up a petty functionary in a brutal kakistocracy and was apparently perfectly happy with that, right up until the bill came due.

Though I’ve read a lot of WW2 history, it’s not often you get such a close-up look at what it was like for an ordinary middle-class man to become a part of the Nazi regime and to be a mid-level desk perpetrator. Lee makes it dishearteningly easy to see how Griesinger—and many others—chose that path, with no apparent qualms of conscience.

I was hooked the minute I read the book summary. I'm happy that the book lived up the hype it created for me. the idea that an armchair full of Nazi documents that ends up countries away with no explanation at first was a historical mystery that was absolutely fascinating to watch unravel. Post war events were the most interesting parts of the book for me. War is hell and the men behind it are often even worse.
The ending of this book felt like a real payoff that made the read so worth it.
Recommend Recommend Recommend

The premise of this book grabbed me right away: Nazi documents are found in an old armchair and were discovered when its current owner wanted to have it reupholstered. The writer follows the trail of the documents and reconstructs much of the life of Nazi Dr. Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart, who joined the S.S. and worked at the Reich’s Ministry of Economics and Labor in Nazi-occupied Prague during the war

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It's meticulously researched and anyone who likes WWII fiction will enjoy this nonfiction account. It is very fact-heavy though and doesn't always read like a story which can be difficult at times.