Nazi history

Three-and-a-half miles south-west of Nuremberg in the small town of Stein stands the Schloss Faber-Castell, a 19th-century neo-Renaissance castle built for a dynasty of pencil manufacturers. In October 1945 it became home to hundreds of reporters who were covering the trial of 21 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher and Albert Speer, with Martin Bormann being tried in absentia. Alfred Döblin offered a first-hand account of the courtroom in which he never set foot Prominent among the reporters were internationally celebrated writers such as John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Elsa Triolet, Erika Mann and Erich Kästner, as well as the future German chancellor

It was a clear cold morning in January 1936 when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler arrived at the luxurious Regina Palast Hotel in central Munich. He had come to pick up a group of businessmen for a day trip. Their destination: Dachau concentration camp. Nazi Germany’s first official camp had been set up by Himmler in March 1933 to detain the new regime’s political enemies. It became the prototype on which other camps were modelled. Himmler’s wealthy guests were given a personal tour by the SS leader and were impressed. Their host was ‘very carefully prepared and dressed up’, one of them commented afterwards. As the party walked through Dachau, they were