Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 5, 2023

The Complicated Case of a Reluctant Nazi

Karl Gönner started out as a committed party member. Later he saved the lives of Frenchmen.

Raised in Oklahoma to German-immigrant parents, Burkhard Bilger learned at the age of twenty-eight that his grandfather, Karl Gönner, worked for the Nazi occupation authorities in eastern France. Years later Bilger wrote a book about Gönner, who was expressing his enthusiasm for Nazism by 1932, and joined the party in May of the following year. Robert Philpot writes in his review:

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