A fascinating and very different view of the horrors of pre War and WWII Berlin, and the topography of terror, from a psychiatrist who researched sociopathy and the way Nazis used language to brainwash a nation, but who also had her own personal mission to get restitution for the large property stolen from her father’s family as the Nazi’s stripped the Jewish people of their rights leading up to WWII. This fight for justice all these years after WWII proved difficult and emotionally draining, including having to fight the descendants of the Nazi family who had stolen the property and who believed it was theirs by right.

Dr Joanne Intrator only understood her father's harrowing history after her father died, when she went through his files in New York, and studied the letters that he had meticulously saved. Her father's deathbed questions started her search, and her long journey to restitution for her family's property stolen in a forced auction by the Nazis. Almost unbelievably, she had to fight the descendents of the Nazi family who had stolen it! Her grandfather, who escaped from Germany only at the last minute, died of a heart attack soon after arriving in America. Her father lost his career, and a grand lifestyle in Berlin, and worked at menial jobs in the US. Her cousin was killed in a concentration camp.

It's a harrowing, but a heroic story, because Dr Intrator had to cope with unhelpful lawyers, the German bureacracy and mysteries surrounding the terrible truth about how her family was treated during the war, and the Nazi business which bought the building. As a psychiatrist studying sociopathy, she also looks into the way that the Nazis used language, and the way that they were able to brainwash the German people. She also writes about the emotional effects that her quest for justice had on her, and her family.

I almost always like books about restitution from Nazi terror, and this was well-worth reading.

I received this free ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.