“She may have been the first German, and certainly the first German woman, who tried to face her past with honesty.”
In a blog post for the New Yorker, Helen Epstein describes a remarkable memoir she has just reprinted at Plunkett Lake Press.
It’s by Melita Maschmann, a German woman who became “a hundred-and-fifty-per-cent Nazi” during World War II, even spying on her half-Jewish best friend’s family for the Gestapo. The book, written as a stricken apology to that friend, tries to figure out where Maschmann—and Germany as a whole—went wrong.
