Im Machtbereich der Gestapo; Erlebnis-Roman, der Wirklichkeit nacherzählt – “In the Domain of the Gestapo; A Memoir-Based Novel Recounting Reality” – The notes of the prisoner Paul Frenk in the form of a “memoir-based novel” exposing the terrible crimes of the German Gestapo, told in the third person to conceal the author’s identity, but without hesitation in his words regarding Nazi crimes. Published by Lippia-Verlag, Lipstadt, 1946 – First Edition. German.
A bold publication exposing the atrocities of the German Gestapo, written in real-time during the months author Paul Frenk spent in solitary confinement. Frenk, a German journalist by profession, was accused of prematurely revealing Germany’s intentions to invade Czechoslovakia and exposing the lies published in the propaganda materials issued by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Captured by the Gestapo, he was detained, tortured, and imprisoned under the cruel supervision of Gestapo soldiers alongside German, Czech, and Austrian prisoners. At the beginning of the book, he declares:
“When I was in solitary confinement at the infamous ‘Stadelheim’ in Munich and later in the Landsberg Fortress after my conviction by the special court in Munich for continuing my attacks on the party leader… and Hitler’s state… I recorded the findings and political demands in keywords with a small pencil on scraps of paper so that these notes would escape the cell to safety between 1940 and 1942… May this book, through its simple yet captivating design, find interest and understanding among readers of a wide range of worldviews, and may it also allow members of the Allied nations to understand the complex causal circumstances that led the German people into this chaos…”
The author details the horrors that occurred in Gestapo prisons – the persecution of Gestapo officers against “regime opponents, “the way “mass waves of arrests” took place, and the various types of torture that prisoners endured. Frenk describes how prisoners accused of various degrees of “treason, “severe betrayal, “military disintegration” or “preparation for treason” arrived in prisons and were all tortured during the first 10 hours while being completely stripped of their clothes in order to find concealed documents or weapons, after which they were subjected to forced labor under starvation conditions and exposed to diseases such as pneumonia and typhus, all while suffering daily beatings and torture during labor, executions by guillotine, and other methods of torture. He recounts how German citizens, disillusioned with the intoxication of Hitler’s admiration, were forced to hide their opinions and lived in constant fear of being caught by the Gestapo. He also reveals how the German judicial system fully collaborated with Hitler’s totalitarian regime, where “the defendant’s right to self-defense does not exist in Hitler’s state.”
A special chapter in the book is dedicated to the tortures endured by Jews in the Gestapo dungeons, describing in heartbreaking detail the various methods of murder employed by the Germans, many of which are revealed here for the first time. The gruesome torture method in a bathroom, where Jews were placed under a deadly water stream with the shower nozzles sealed, suffocating the prisoner within minutes, is described here in detail, as is the loading of corpses into crematoriums. This chapter is emotionally challenging to read due to the atrocities described in it. In another chapter, he describes the arrest of S.-, a Jewish senior council member who managed to escape to Switzerland but was arrested for being Jewish and lost his sanity due to the tortures he endured.
The secondary title of the book, “Memoir-Based Novel (Erlebnis-Roman), ” refers to a literary genre focused on describing personal experiences and real events under a different name during the Nazi era out of fear of being caught while writing the notes. The author’s suffering in the Gestapo dungeons is not written in the first person but rather through the narrative of a person named “Rudolf Berger” in the third person, which actually refers to himself. However, he boldly calls Hitler “the great demagogue” and describes the reality exactly as it was in the prisons. The book’s title illustration was created by Albert Schmitz, with the original sticker attached by the publisher stating in German: “The intention to provide this book with a hardcover was unfortunately canceled due to a shortage of binding materials.”
89, [6] pages. Slight tears on the spine. Good condition.
