The Hitler Diaries by Jim Williams
The Hitler Diaries by Jim Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This certainly isn’t a bad book. Unfortunately, it shows that this book was its author’s first novel. The story is fairly convoluted with a lot of characters most of which are expendable and don’t really add much to the book. The decision not to do additional work before this re-publication was, in my eyes, a mistake since the story could have benefited greatly from some down-stripping to the essentials.
For me, as a German, the numerous mistakes (e. g. the wrong spelling “Fraülein” instead of “Fräulein”) are fairly annoying and could have easily been avoided.
Furthermore, we all know what happened some time after the original publication of this book – the faked “Hitler diaries” appeared in a German magazine. Knowing that didn’t really help my enjoyment of this book.
All in all, I’d have advised against re-publishing this book. It certainly had its time and its merits but its time has passed long ago and its merits are overshadowed by the mistakes of a young ambitious author.
