"Eye-Witness Account of Hitler's WWI Years Found"

Spiegel Online International has a story about my new book...: "Hitler's years in the German army during World War I have long been a mystery due to the lack of eyewitness accounts. Now a memoir written by a forgotten German author of fantastic literature has been rediscovered -- and sheds new light on the Führer.

The words were written by Alexander Moritz Frey, a young medical assistant in the German trenches during World War I:

"One evening a pale, tall man tumbled down into the cellar after the first shells of the daily evening attack had begun to fall, fear and rage glowing in his eyes. At that time he looked tall, because he was so thin. A full moustache ... covered the ugly slit of his mouth."

"He sat there panting .... His yellow face grew red ... and he resembled a gobbling turkey as he began to rant about the English. ... I immediately had the same impression that many had of him later -- that he took the military maneuvers of the enemy personally, as if they wanted to take his precious life in particular."

Years later, they would. The man Frey had met was Private Adolf Hitler.

But Frey's writings on Hitler -- in the form of essays and fiction -- were eventually forgotten. Historians have spent the decades since the Nazi dictator took his life in his Berlin bunker at the very end of World War II trying to decipher the Hitler enigma -- but nobody really knew what Hitler the soldier was like.

Until now. German journalist Stefan Ernsting recently rediscovered the work that Frey, who served alongside Hitler in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, left behind. Ernsting's new biography of Hitler's fellow soldier, "The Fantastic Rebel Alexander Moritz Frey," republishes Frey's eyewitness accounts of the man who would change 20th century history. It is the first reliable, first-person account by someone who served alongside Hitler."