I Knew Hitler

Hardcover. ex library half leather, usual stickers and marks. With 38 illustrations (illustrator). 1st Edition. The first British publication, dated 1938 and thus one year later than the first American. (This is not a translation -- Ludecke wrote in English.) Ludecke dedicated this 1937 book "In Memory of Captain Ernst Roehm and Gregor Strasser and Many Other Nazis Who Were Betrayed, Murdered, and Traduced in Their Graves." An early study of the German Fuhrer and other Nazi leaders by an activist who had been seduced (politically, at least) by Hitler and joined the movement as early as 1922, but who soon lost his position in the S.A. in a quarrel with Hermann Goering. Ludecke actually spent 1924 through 1932 in America (where, still a good Nazi, he founded the Swastika League of America and a publication called the "American Guard.") He returned to Germany in May, 1933, but found himself out of favor, and was soon imprisoned on Hitler's orders in the Oranienburg concentration camp, where he served eight months before either escaping or being released in March, 1934, whereupon he again left the country. He thus escaped that summer's "Night of the Long Knives," when it's presumed he would have been put to death along with Roehm and many other increasingly inconvenient veteran S.A. Brownshirt thugs. Ludecke, who reports many verbatim conversations with Hitler, is often cited as a source on the early days of the movement, but carefully. It appears that before World War One -- before he became the fledgling Hitler's emissary, traveling abroad to seek support from Mussolini and even (unsuccesfully) from Henry Ford -- Ludecke had been basically a con man, hustler, and gigolo in France, England, and the United States, devising schemes to separate the wealthy (and especially wealthy women) from their money, jewelry, and other valuables. Denied U.S. citizenship in 1938, he was arrested as an enemy alien by U.S. authorities in February, 1942, and held prisoner for four years. Ludecke returned to Germany in the 1950s, and died in Bavaria in 1960. Totals 715 pp. including index,