It's the personal experiences that always shape our views

What journalist Ursula von Kardoff wrote in her diary 71 years ago today. She was born in Berlin in 1911, her father was an artist. In the early years she was a supporter of the Nazis and worked on a Nazi newspaper. She slowly became disenchanted with the party. Her brother's death on the front in 1943 turned her into an ardent anti Nazi. Interesting too; so much of our disenchantments end up being the result of personal experiences, nothing to do with high-sounding values and beliefs.

 12 January 1943

I sometimes feel like a candle burning at both ends. At the front my brothers and my friends are fighting for a victory the very prospect of which fills me with horror. To think Hitler as the Master of Europe!

The picture supplement we had to get out for our New Year issue was entitled ‘The German Soldier Keeps Watch’ – in the Russian winter, under the African sun, in submarines in the Atlantic, beneath the palm trees of Southern France, in the ice of Finland. How can we possibly hold such an extended front for any length of time? It is beyond all sense and reason. We seem to be asking for retribution. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ?’

But I suppose it must be some kind of perversion to hope that one’s own country will be defeated. Anyhow it is something utterly beyond the comprehension of the worthy citizens who glory in their power and possessions.

Klaus tumed up yesterday from Miinsingen and I asked a few people in to meet him. The sirens went at the beginning and after the all-clear we got into a mood of rather sinister merriment. Papa, retuming from a memorial service for E. R. Weiss, had passed burning houses on his way home, and was shocked at us.

But for some reason I was bursting with vitality and cheerfulness. It was really dreadful to feel like that … to feel that the thickness of a wall could shut out all the horrors, that they were nothing to do with me at all.