The historian Daniel Lee attended a dinner party at which a fellow guest revealed an interesting story. They owned an armchair, acquired by the family many years ago, which they sent to be reupholstered. When the fabric and stuffing were removed a number of documents were discovered to have been hidden within the chair. The SS Officer’s Armchair is the story of the author’s search to find out more about the owners of the papers, a low level SS Officer and lawyer called Robert Griesenger.
Griesenger was a lawyer who joined the Nazi party in its early days and rose to power with them. In fact he never achieved great status himself but he was very ambitious and complicit in much which was happening at the time – he certainly benefitted personally from his position. Eventually he ended up working in Prague where he died in unknown circumstances at the end of the war. It seems that when he thought that he was in danger of arrest by the Allies that he hid his incriminating documents in the armchair and was never able to retrieve them – apparently finding such things hidden in furniture from this period is not unusual.
Griesenger is not an important figure in the war but what this book shows is how everyday Germans lived and how some of them benefitted from what was happening – the author argues that however humdrum the work done by Griesenger was it still contributed to the evil perpetrated by the Nazis and that Griesenger must have known what was going on.
The book follows the author’s detective work as he investigated the life of this man and as he traced his ancestors and relatives who are still alive today. I find this sort of narrative fascinating and I was interested in what the author uncovered about Griesenger’s life and the lives of others associated with him.
Griesenger was an ordinary, if ambitious, German and his story illuminates what life was like for SS Officers like him during the war. I found it a very interesting read.
Anne Is Reading 