Hampshire Chronicle 10 September 2009
They call him'the bloke who lived opposite Hitler' FOR many of his 84 years, Edgar of four or five long black Mercedes. Feuchtwange4 who lives near "His SS bodyguards, who, bY now, Winchester, has lived with the label of occupied the flats below his, would "the bloke who lived opposite Hitler". take their seats and the engines As a young boy in the German citY would start rewing. of Munich, back in the 1930s,Edgar, a "Hitler wbuld emerge, now alwaYs former University of SouthamPton - dressed in military uniform, and take history lecturer, and his family lived his place bv the driver of the leading opposite the apartment which was car.-and th6 motorcade would roar then the home of the future German awav.I felt even then that this was a dictator, mari who could shake the world to its Ironically, Edgar's Jewish familY foundations." was to live for some time just a few Edgar recalls how, on his waY to doors away from Hitler, the man who school, he would admire the gleaming. would later instigate the "Final silver Mercedes coup6 coming and Solution". .going from the underground garage at Last week's 70th anniversary of the ihe villa of Heinrich Hoffmann, start of World War II rekindled many Hitler's photographer and employer of childhood memories for Edgar as it the dictator's mistress, Eva Braun. was in 1939 that his parents sent him "The parents of a school friend of away from home to live in England. mine lived next door to Hoffmann, "I was about 14 at the time and I and, I remember, ProbablY after the arrived in Britain all alone and not beginning of the Third Reich, Hitler knowing very much English," said sitiing quietly in a deckchair in the Edear.
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