Last week, the Channel 4 documentary series ‘Dictator: The Hitler Interviews’ featured historical testimony from the late Dr Edgar Feuchtwanger OBE (1924–2025), historian and long-standing member of the Board of LBI London.
The series examines the rise and exercise of power of Adolf Hitler through the perspectives, testimonies and archival accounts of those who lived alongside his regime, including associates, contemporaries and eye-witnesses.
Born into a prominent German-Jewish family in Munich, Edgar Feuchtwanger spent his childhood on Prinzregentenplatz, directly across the street from Hitler’s apartment. In his account, he reflects on his early memories of seeing Hitler in the neighbourhood, the gradual shift in everyday life under the Nazi regime, and his uncle, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, whose critical writings made the family a particular target of Nazi hostility. Following Kristallnacht and his father’s brief imprisonment in Dachau, Feuchtwanger emigrated to Britain in 1939.
Dr Feuchtwanger went on to build a distinguished academic career as a historian of nineteenth-century British political history and Anglo-German relations at the University of Southampton. As a member of the Board of LBI London, he contributed both scholarly expertise and personal experience of exile and renewal to the Institute’s work of preserving and promoting German-Jewish history.
The episode is available to stream via Channel 4: Dictator: The Hitler Interviews
