The S.S. Officer's Armchair

Based on documents discovered concealed within a simple chair for seventy years, The S.S. Officer's Armchair is historian Daniel Lee's gripping investigation into the life of a single S.S. officer during World War Two, whose story encapsulates the tragic experience of war for a generation of Europeans. One night at a dinner party in Florence, World War Two historian Daniel Lee was told about a remarkable discovery. An upholsterer in Amsterdam had found a bundle of swastika-covered documents inside the cushion of an armchair he was repairing. The documents belonged to Dr. Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart, who worked at the Reich's Ministry of Economics and Labour in Occupied Prague during the war. The S.S. Officer's Armchair is the story of Lee's investigation to uncover who Dr. Griesinger was, and how his most precious documents ended up hidden inside a chair, hundreds of miles from Prague and Stuttgart. Lee weaves detection with biography to tell an extraordinary narrative of ambition and intimacy in the Third Reich. He uncovers Griesinger's American backstory -- his father was born in New Orleans and the family had ties to the plantations and music halls of nineteenth century Louisiana. As Lee follows the footsteps of a rank and file Nazi official seventy years later, and chronicles what became of him and his family at the war's end, he discovers an unforeseen connection between Griesinger and the murder of his own relatives in the Holocaust. The S.S. Officer's Armchair is an enthralling detective story and a reconsideration of daily life in the Third Reich. Lee dispels the image of the 'ordinary German' and provides a window into the life of one of Hitler's millions of nameless followers.