Accidental journey

Life at Cambridge was idyllic for the student elite in the Fall of 1939, redolent with a Brideshead Revisited ambiance that sheltered those inside from the harsh political realities brewing outside. Mark Lynton, ne Max-Otto Ludwig Loewenstein, a German Jew from a privileged background, was not unlike the other students, who barely noticed the war in those early days, keeping to his routine of attending lectures, playing squash and golf, going to movies and sherry parties.

This all changed in an instant, as he and other German and Austrian aliens were interned suddenly and without warning and sent to Liverpool, and then Canada and finally back to Europe, thrown headlong into a turbulent seven-year odyssey far removed from the lotus-eating days of student life.

This remarkable story follows the author as he exchanges privilege for privation and becomes part of the war effort, first as a private with shovel in the Pioneer Corps, then as an officer in the Royal Tank Corps, and finally, after the fighting ends, with the Intelligence Corps, where he is tapped to interrogate such diverse people as Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, the most senior of all German generals, and Dr. Werner Best, the complex, cultured German viceroy stationed in Denmark.

Lynton, present at the suicide of Himmler and the arrest of Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, plays out his army career as the "gray eminence" on the political scene of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. Acerbically witty and grandly entertaining, this is a personal history of the most gripping and engaging kind.