No Ordinary Neighbour (Hardback)

There was seemingly nothing unusual about Erwin Stahlberg when the author Bruce Thompson met him for the first time. A Christian minister who has spent much of his life studying the Holocaust, and raising awareness of what led up to it, Thompson had little idea of what would be revealed in the years ahead.

It turned out that for his eighty years in the UK, this generous, affable, and kindly neighbour had managed to keep secret the truth behind his wartime service. He eventually became willing to share the reality with just one person: the author of this book.

No Ordinary Neighbour is the record of a growing relationship that led to an astonishing admission. Through conversations over the last decades of his life, Erwin Stahlberg slowly disclosed his true identity in a protracted confession to the writer. He was, it transpires, one of the last surviving members of the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler. Eventually, a photograph would reveal just how close Stahlberg was to senior commanders in his unit.

This is a story of guilt, regret, shame, anger, confusion, and a deep desire for others to hear of the ease with which evil can take hold of the human psyche and society. We are transported from an impoverished childhood in 1920s Berlin to training with the most elite unit within Himmler's SS. We travel with Stahlberg on a troop train heading east to the killing fields of southern Ukraine in the autumn of 1941. After surviving two tours on the Russian front, which included experiencing some of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, Stahlberg was part of the defence of Normandy following the D-Day landings in 1944. Captured on the outskirts of Brussels in late summer 1944, Stahlberg only just escaped execution by a British guard, before becoming a Prisoner of War until late 1948.

This account will shock and disturb, but not necessarily in the way many would expect or imagine. What is so surprising is how ordinary Stahlberg was: he could so easily have been anyone's favourite elderly uncle. This is no conventional memoir, it is a deep examination of how one young man could so readily become immersed in a brutal military unit, one of the most feared of the Nazi regime, and explores the lessons we must learn afresh today.