Beautiful and gripping, it unfolds like a detective story as an obscured past emerges into the light.

Memorable and chilling... As well as a brilliant researcher, Lee proves himself to be an insightful narrator - of both the life of a Nazi "desk murderer", and the continuing attempts of Griesinger's family to come to terms with the long shadow his role as an SS officer has cast over their lives.

An intriguing, honest and superbly documented portrait of what could be called an 'unremarkable' SS life... The strength of Lee's book is the way these facts of history are twinned with the perverted domesticity of everyday Nazism... The armchair stuffed with hidden swastikas is an apt symbol for that weird and disturbing double life.

[An] absorbing work of historical detection... Lee's riveting book opens a window onto the life of an "ordinary" Nazi.

Understand this mediocre, provincial Nazi and you understand the terrible tragedy of 20th-century Germany... This is an admirable work of historical research, and is carefully and briskly written. Lee has been a pitbull of a researcher.

A page-turning piece of detective work in which the Jewish historian painstakingly weaves together scraps of evidence to assemble a fascinating portrait of an ordinary man who helped perpetrate extraordinary crimes... Utterly compelling.

Balancing historical research of the highest professional level with writing...that reads like a fast-paced detective novel... The SS Officer's Armchair is such a compelling read because Lee leaves no stone unturned... Fascinating.

This is a little gem of a book. It is beautifully written and reads as grippingly as a detective story. The story of the quest is fascinating in itself but the result is also a work of serious historical scholarship. Its reconstitution of the life and career of an 'ordinary Nazi' throws revealing light on the workings of the Nazi regime.

A fascinating true-life detective story, as the author engagingly chronicles his searches in archives and interviews with elderly survivors... An illuminating biography and more evidence for the "banality of evil".

Richly detailed and eloquent... Lee's granular focus reveals the mechanisms by which ordinary Germans were drawn into horrific crimes. Even those well-versed in the history of the Holocaust will learn something new.

Assiduously researched... Daniel Lee's remarkable book will give its readers food for thought of what has been and what could be.

Beginning with his discovery of a cache of papers sewed, inexplicably, into an old armchair, Daniel Lee traces the life of an ordinary though far from insignificant Nazi bureaucrat, showing, as his story slides into horror, that there is no such thing as an armchair Nazi. His interviews with the surviving children and grandchildren add a poignant postscript to this powerful investigation of the war between memory and oblivion.

In Daniel Lee's The S.S. Officer's Armchair, the story of an utterly obscure and 'ordinary' SS officer, recovered through extraordinary research, is embedded in the illuminating context of upper-middle-class German society and family life in the first half of the 20th century. The result is a fascinating combination of social history, family drama, and ingenious detective work.

An extraordinary book that lingers in the memory long after you've read the final page. I became totally engrossed in Daniel Lee's investigations to discover the story behind long hidden Nazi documents.

Many of the most horrific acts against humanity during the Holocaust were carried out by the untold thousands of low-level, virtually-unknown civil servants, who facilitated the worst deeds of the Nazi enterprise without ever getting their own hands dirty. In this brilliantly researched story of one such 'ordinary Nazi,' Daniel Lee illuminates the whole.

A captivating portrait of an "ordinary Nazi." It is also a compelling account of Lee's sleuthwork... Lee propels his reader toward a denouement rich in mystery, mayhem, and high-stakes drama... Thanks to this skillful salvage operation, we can now see [Griesinger] for who he really was.

An interesting look into how people remember the past, how countries remember the past... This is a welcome addition to German twentieth-century history.

Both an historical detective story and a gripping account of one historian's hunt for answers, The SS Officer's Armchair is at once a unique addition to our understanding of Nazi Germany and a chilling reminder of how such regimes are made not by monsters, but by ordinary people.

A fascinating tale.

Aftermath captures brilliantly the atmosphere of everyday life in the destroyed cities of divided postwar Germany

Subtle, perceptive and beautifully written

Many consider the years before 1945 to be the most crucial in understanding Germany and the Germans. Wait until you have read this book.

Harald Jähner's deeply researched, panoramic account of how Germany rebuilt and discovered itself from 1945-1955 is an eye-opening, thrilling read

A magnificent overview of the astonishing decade in Germany that followed the defeat of Nazism

Eye-opening and often moving... a sobering look at how societies rebuild

Highly readable... Counter-intuitive but thoughtful

[A] thoughtful narrative... filling the yawning gap on bookshop shelves between a growing number of modern German history texts and the oversupply of Nazi studies that end in Hitler's bunker

Aftermath takes in the immediate postwar years where Germany was administered by the Allies... Jähner excels

Fascinating... Books about Word War II continue to spill out by the ton, but there has been less attention paid to how Germans coped with the country's shameful Nazi past after the conflict was over

Rarely has a non-fiction book so skilfully combined vividness, drama and eloquence.

Jähner's gripping 500-page X-ray-vision tale of an often overlooked and misperceived phase of German history reveals, like all great history books, as much about the first decade after the war as about today.

Clearly written, full of empathy for everyday life, which is far too seldom taken into consideration... You devour it like a novel.

A popular work of non-fiction in the best sense.