My Father's Country

In this gripping memoir, the daughter of a man who conspired to assassinate Hitler tells the story of three generations of her family and offers unparalleled insight into the German experience in the last century. On August 15, 1944, Major Hans Georg Klamroth was tried for treason for his part in the July Plot to kill Hitler. Eleven days later, he was executed. His youngest daughter, Wibke Bruhns, was six years old. Decades later, watching a documentary about the events of July 20, she saw images of her father in court suddenly appear on-screen. "I stare at this man with the empty face. I don't know him. But I can see myself in him." How could her family succumb to Nazi sympathies? And what made her father finally renounce Hitler?

Wibke Bruhns was born in 1938 in Halberstadt. She has worked as a journalist in both TV and print and as a TV presenter and news reader. She worked as a correspondent for Stern magazine in the United States and Israel and headed the culture section at one of Germany’s largest television stations, ORB. She has two grown daughters and now lives and works as a freelance writer in Berlin.