I was Hitler's neighbour: ‘If he'd known we were Jewish, we'd have been sent to Dachau'

The Guardian

10-05-2025

The odds were against Edgar Feuchtwanger reaching the age of 100. He was born on 28 September 1924 into a time of poverty and political turmoil in post-first world war Germany. He was also born into a Jewish family in a society that was about to turn to National Socialism, an ideology that would ultimately be responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. In 1929, when Feuchtwanger was five, something happened that made his long life even more unlikely. He got a new neighbour: Adolf Hitler.
In October that year, Hitler moved into the grand second-floor flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16 in Munich. His previous flat, on the other side of the Isar, the river that divides Munich, had become too small. Munich to him was the 'Capital of the Movement', a title he awarded the city officially in 1935. From 1929 on he lived in nine rooms in this corner building, with its long balconies and baroque facade. His staff moved in with him, and, soon, devotees and high-ranking SS officers were flocking to the flats nearby. Diagonally opposite, at Grillparzerstrasse 38, with a direct view of Hitler's flat, lived the Feuchtwanger family.
Edgar Feuchtwanger, whom his parents called Bürschi, grew up in a respected and wealthy family that employed a chef and a nanny. His father, Ludwig, was a publisher and lawyer; his mother, Erna, a pianist. Intellectuals of the early 20th century were constantly in and out of the family home: the writer Thomas Mann; the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who later became a Nazi legal theorist and party member. And, of course, Ludwig's brother, and Edgar's uncle, Lion Feuchtwanger, the author of the novels Jew Süss and Success.
Hitler and the Feuchtwangers lived across the street from each other for years – until the family emigrated to England in 1939, just before the outbreak of the second world war. 'Nowadays, I am perhaps the only living witness who saw and experienced Hitler directly and had some kind of contact with him,' says Feuchtwanger.
We are sitting in Feuchtwanger's living room in his home near Winchester in Hampshire. The sun shines through the large window, directly on to him, and he must be incredibly warm in his suit, complete with shirt and tie. He is of the generation that dresses smartly for appointments like this, his daughter Antonia Cox tells me. Sitting on the sofa, he doesn't look 100 years old. But he doesn't hear so well any more, and needs a walking frame to get around and a wheelchair for longer distances. Cox and her brother Adrian Feuchtwanger have warned me that he will need to take regular breaks during our interview.
We talk in German. The stories he tells me are a mixture of his own experiences and those told to him by his parents. Some things he no longer remembers. He has forgotten, for example, that he stood in Hitler's flat in Munich around 10 years ago, but Cox is there to help him out. The apartment has been a police station since 1949, to prevent it becoming a pilgrimage site for old Nazis and neo-Nazis. Feuchtwanger visited it and looked out through the window at the flat where his family once lived. Other things he remembers very clearly. The years when he lived opposite Hitler are deeply embedded in his memory. Twelve years ago, with the French journalist Bertil Scali, he wrote everything down in his book Hitler, My Neighbour.
The Feuchtwangers first noticed that they had a new neighbour because of one banal detail: their morning delivery of milk was missing. Hitler, the milkman explained to Edgar's mother, had claimed most of it for himself. He presumably needed it for his SS bodyguards.
As a five-year-old, did he even know who Hitler was? 'Well, I knew that this was a man who was not very – how should I put it?– well disposed towards us as Jews. He had already tried to come to power in Munich in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923,' says Feuchtwanger. On the evening of 8 November, Hitler and his brownshirts stormed into the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, declared the government of the German Reich dismissed and called for revolution. The putsch failed. Hitler was arrested, charged with high treason and sentenced to five years in prison in April 1924. He was granted early release at the end of the year, having started work on Mein Kampf.
In the Feuchtwanger household, Hitler was spoken of as a 'ridiculous figure' because of this failed coup, Feuchtwanger remembers. 'People believed that Hitler was a temporary phenomenon,' he says. In particular, his uncle Lion wavered between feeling alarmed and remaining calm. In his satirical novel Success, which he published in 1930, Lion portrays Hitler as a hysterical man named Kutzner who tries to seduce the people with nationalist ideas but ultimately fails. 'Although he regarded Hitler as very dangerous, he saw him as someone to be made fun of. Hitler was supposed to continue as a ridiculous figure and then he would somehow disappear from the scene,' Feuchtwanger says.
Did his father, Ludwig, urge Lion not to write this book? 'I don't know whether he actually advised him against it, but he certainly didn't want my uncle to put himself in even more danger. It was a matter of luck that Lion was on a reading tour in America when Hitler became Reich chancellor in 1933. Fortunately, the German ambassador there was not a Nazi. He realised immediately that my uncle couldn't go back to Germany; he would have been killed.' Lion, who had also publicly mocked Mein Kampf, was one of the first to be stripped of his citizenship by the National Socialists, and his books were banned and burned.
Soon, Feuchtwanger's parents spoke of nothing but politics and the danger posed by Hitler. Did he feel threatened, I ask. 'Well, nobody actually knew that it would become so threatening until it really did. As a child, I grew up very sheltered.' Everything seemed rather harmless to him, Feuchtwanger says. Hitler and National Socialism remained an abstract threat. He saw Hitler's silhouette in the flat opposite, as the cars drove up and chauffeured him to the Berghof, his residency near Berchtesgaden. 'Whenever I went to school, I had to pass the house of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where Hitler was often in the garden. He was lying in a deckchair. So it all seemed quite – how should I put it – normal and unthreatening.'
It was in 1933, when Adolf Hitler had just become Reich chancellor, that Feuchtwanger met him face to face for the first time. 'Down from Prinzregentenplatz you could go out on to the meadows, get some fresh air, which was of course always important to the nannies. Once, when we were on our way, Hitler had just come out of his house. There was a car that he obviously wanted to get into and he saw that we had stopped to let him pass and he thanked us.' Until then, he had only ever seen him from a distance. Now he was standing in front of him. 'He was actually just an ordinary person. There was nothing special about him,' Feuchtwanger says.
That was the only time he met him up close? 'Yes, and he didn't know who we were then. He just saw a woman with a small boy.' Hitler was unaware that the boy was Jewish; that he was a Feuchtwanger, related to Lion. What would have happened if he had known all this? 'He would have done something. Without a doubt.' When I ask what he means by 'done something', he replies: 'I'm sure we would have been killed in Dachau.'
Feuchtwanger seems tired at this point in the conversation. While he dozes, his son shows me pictures from Feuchtwanger's childhood, where he is with friends and wearing lederhosen. All over the house are piles of books and folders with documents from his childhood in Nazi Germany; family photos and awards hang on the walls. Next to Feuchtwanger is the German edition of his latest book, written with Cox, entitled Letters from a Child Exile (it will be published in the UK in spring 2026). The book compiles letters he wrote in 1939 to his parents from England while he waited for their arrival.
After a few minutes Feuchtwanger tells me he's ready to continue. In his memoir, I say, there is the following quote from his father: 'Right in front of his eyes we are safer. His genius is so great that he forgets to look out of the window.' As his neighbours, they were hiding in plain sight. Feuchtwanger no longer remembers his father saying this, he says, 'but it was certainly not the intention to emigrate. My father was very connected to German culture. That was his life.'
As time went on, what Feuchtwanger saw from his room on the second floor changed. He had noticed how the counterdemonstrations had diminished, how people now stopped in front of the Führer's apartment with their arms outstretched and shouted 'Heil Hitler', how the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain came to visit. Chamberlain was invited to Hitler's private flat after they had signed the Munich agreement in the Führerbau, the building that symbolised the Nazis' power, together with the Italian prime minister, Benito Mussolini, and France's prime minister, Édouard Daladier.
The Feuchtwangers' lives were also changing. 'We noticed that Hitler was a very clever man, the way he managed everything. It wasn't good for us either,' says Feuchtwanger. While Hitler's world was growing, his was shrinking.
After the Nuremberg race laws were enacted in 1935, the Feuchtwangers lost their staff and Edgar his nanny, because Jews were no longer allowed to be employers. They were not allowed to enter shops. His father lost his job at the publishing house. Schoolmates turned against Edgar because they did not want to be friends with Jews.
As a child, did he even realise the significance of being Jewish? 'Jewishness didn't play a big role in my life before the rise of National Socialism. It did in my father's life, because my grandparents were Orthodox Jews. But by my time that had completely faded away. I didn't know much about it,' he says. After Hitler came to power, the family became more conscious of it. 'He turned it into something. And I didn't really understand that. Back then, at primary school, I was like the other children at first. I went along with all the Nazi stuff. Have you seen my exercise books?'
He leans forwards and reaches for a worn notebook. A few sheets almost fall out. There is a huge swastika on the first page. He drew it himself when he was about eight years old. 'The teacher's name was Miss Weikl, and she was very pro-Nazi right from the start, I think. She gave us tasks as children.' She dictated poems, had the children write birthday greetings to Hitler and make drawings of the 'true' map of Germany, including the regions that the teacher said had been taken away from them. Did he ever question what he was drawing? 'No. I did what the teacher wanted me to, and my parents said: 'Do what the teacher says.'' What did his parents say about the drawings? 'Nothing. They didn't want trouble; they didn't want me to fight back.'
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If his parents had believed until then that Hitler was only a temporary phenomenon, that they were perhaps safer living right under his nose, they now realised that they needed to flee. 'The point where it became really dangerous was when Vom Rath was shot. My father knew straight away that this was going to be very serious.' The German diplomat Ernst vom Rath had been killed in Paris on 7 November 1938 by a Jew. The assassination was part of the justification for what followed. Two days later came the November pogroms, sometimes known as Kristallnacht: synagogues were set on fire, Jewish shops were destroyed and looted, and Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps – among them Feuchtwanger's father, Ludwig.
'They came in the evening and took him to the concentration camp in Dachau, half an hour away from Munich. Later, they seized his books – I remember that well. My mother tried everything to get him out of the camp,' says Feuchtwanger. Was he aware of what concentration camps were back then? 'Everyone knew that Dachau existed, that it could easily be deadly.' Deadly meaning that people were shot? 'Yes. It was winter and they had to stand still for hours. If a person fell down, he was usually killed. The Nazis wanted people to know that, so that they wouldn't resist them.'
Six weeks passed, during which Feuchtwanger's mother called numerous offices, travelled to the Dachau concentration camp herself and handed over some food for her husband at the gate, on which was written 'Arbeit macht frei' as on many other concentration camps. Then, suddenly, Ludwig came home. Feuchtwanger doesn't know why he was released. But he remembers that his father looked frighteningly thin, that he had to go to bed immediately. 'He was seriously weakened.'
As soon as his father was back on his feet, the family started making preparations for their departure. Many friends, including Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, to whom Edgar had often delivered books on loan from Ludwig's library, had long since left Germany. With money from Lion and other family members, they were able to obtain a family visa for England at a cost of £1,000, a vast sum back then.
Two months passed before Feuchtwanger boarded the train in Munich. His father accompanied him as far as the Danish border, then travelled back to Munich, while Feuchtwanger got on a boat to England. He was 14 years old at the time. It was an adventure for him, he says. 'The day I crossed the border was 19 February 1939 and it felt as if I had left an evil empire.'
In England, he stayed with a family in Cornwall. He quickly learned the language and got a scholarship for college, but he worried about his parents. The letters that Feuchtwanger wrote during this time bear witness to this, such as this one dated 28 February 1939: 'Dr and Mrs Dyson, I repeat, are particularly nice people. But the other people are very nice too … Come as soon as possible. Until then, all the best, 1,000 kisses. Your Bürschi.'
He kept everything; his mother, Erna, did, too. When I ask him whether he would describe the Feuchtwangers as a family of collectors, he laughs. The past fills the house. A mirror and a painting from the Munich flat hang in the dining room. In the penthouse, as Feuchtwanger jokingly calls the room above the garage, is the grand piano from Munich that he and his mother used to play. His parents packed everything up when they fled, filled two 5-metre-long transport crates, and managed to get permission to have them shipped to England.
Feuchtwanger's parents arrived three months after him, and soon moved to Winchester. But his father never felt at ease in England. 'He was a fish out of water. He couldn't do anything here. He couldn't speak the language. After the war, he wanted to go back to Germany. My mother didn't really want to; she'd had enough of Germany.' His father's plans never became reality: he died in 1947. Lion Feuchtwanger never returned to Germany, either. He lived first in exile in France, until the Nazi invasion forced him to flee. In 1941, he and his wife emigrated to the US, where he died in 1958.
By contrast, Edgar quickly felt at home in England. He studied history, gained his doctorate at Cambridge and lectured at the University of Southampton. He and his wife, Primrose, bought a house in Winchester after their marriage in 1962, and it was there they brought up their three children, Antonia, Adrian and Judith. He now has three grandchildren. Primrose died in 2012. Since then, he has lived alone.
In his work as a historian, Feuchtwanger focused initially on his new country – the Victorian era, Disraeli – and later on the country of his past – National Socialism and the Third Reich.
Did he ever want to go back permanently? 'I made connections with the University of Frankfurt and was a visiting professor. But I didn't want to move back. It was too far away from my life. I mean, English is my everyday language. I can speak German perfectly well, but normally I speak in English.' Is he still a Bavarian? 'I am a Bavarian at heart. And I'm, wait, it says here somewhere …' He fumbles for his magnifying glass and opens a copy of his autobiography, looking for a quote from a friend. 'It says here: an honorary Englishman – that's what I am.'
The confirmation of this, the OBE awarded by the then Prince Charles at Windsor Castle in 2021, dangles from his suit. It was given for his contribution to Anglo-German relations. He also received the German Federal Cross of Merit in 2003.
Looking back, he considers himself lucky. 'I'm still here at over 100 years old, while most of them are gone. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, they were all wiped out.' He laughs. As for his tips on reaching such an impressive age, he never smoked, he says.
Is he a brave person, I ask. 'A what?' I speak louder. He laughs and says immediately: 'No, no, no!' His book tells the story of how in 1930 six-year-old Edgar and his half-sister, who was visiting from Switzerland, went to see whether the nameplate by the doorbell said Hitler. It didn't. The name written there was Winter, the Führer's housekeeper. Quite brave, I say. And travelling alone to England – that was also quite brave. 'I had to go along with it. Even back then, when my father accompanied me on my escape to the border, the SS people came on the train and said to my father: 'Why don't you escape, too?' And my father told them: 'I'll prepare everything.' He left the train and I was just driven on. Of course, it was shocking. But there was nothing else I could do.'
So, he is sticking with no? 'Absolutely. I'm a person who goes along with everything. I take it as it comes. I don't fight against what I can't change. I know I don't make the world turn; it turns without me.'
He remains determined to speak as a contemporary witness about the rise of the Nazi era. 'It was a good thing that I wrote my memoirs when I did. I couldn't do it now.'
More than a decade has passed since he published his book about being Hitler's neighbour. That was a completely different political time, I say. Western democracies have experienced a shift to the right, and the rise of populism. In Germany, the far-right AfD became the second-largest party in the recent federal elections. 'It's very unpleasant that something like this is rising again in Germany,' Feuchtwanger says. 'You look at it with fear.'