To the Bitter End

The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-45

By: Victor Klemperer

Length: 20 hrs

Publisher's summary

The international best-selling record of a German Jew in Nazi Germany. 

A sensation when first published, this is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act in itself. This volume covers the period from the beginnings of the Holocaust to the end of the war, telling the story of Klemperer's increasing isolation, his near miraculous survival, his awareness of the development of the growing Holocaust as friends and associates disappeared, and his narrow escapes from deportation and the Dresden firebombing in 1945. 

Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank's classic.

©1995 Victor Klemperer (P)2022 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

"Deserves to stand beside the diary of Anne Frank as a day-to-day description of the sufferings of the victims of Hitler's evil regime." (Evening Standard)

"Few English readers will fail to be moved as I was - ultimately to the point of tears." (Sunday Telegraph)

"Packed with vivid observation, profound reflection [...] they find hope, dignity and even tart humour in the jaws of hell." (Independent on Sunday)