Book Note: Giles MacDonogh, A Good German

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

A biography of Adam von Trott zu Solz, who turns out to be something of a family connection (close friend of my grandmother Miriam).

An unidentified print in the old family photos collection may be a portrait of him when he was at Göttingen University, where he first met my grandmother. It's very like the one that appears on the first of the photo pages in this book. (There's certainly at least one correctly identified photo of him in the family collection, from his 1939 visit to Miriam in Taft.)

This is a great introduction to the contingent nature of history. All sorts of things that might have removed Hitler from power or prevented WWII, that didn't quite work out. The orders to invade the Sudetenland were going to be the trigger for a coup, but Neville Chamberlain achieved peace in our time and prevented it from happening.

This may be the closest I've read to a German view of WWII. It's not one, really, but since it's a sympathetic treatment of a German patriot, it has to take a fairly German view of things.