The young Irmgard Paul, out walking with her mother in their home town of Berchtesgaden in the late 1930s, remembers being told that, thanks to the large groups of SS men guarding Germany’s messianic leader in his mountainside retreat above them, they lived ‘on a mountain free of crime’. This small but horribly ironic story is just one of many poignant recollections which make it worth reading this candid memoir of a childhood spent, literally, in Hitler’s shadow. 

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