No Ordinary Neighbour : Conversations With One of the Last Surviving Veterans of Hitler’s SS

There was seemingly nothing unusual about his new neighbour when the author, Reverend Bruce Thompson, met him for the first time. A Christian minister who has spent much of his life in Holocaust education, Reverend Thompson had little idea of what would be revealed in the years ahead.It turned out for his eighty years in the UK, this generous, affable, and kindly neighbour had managed to keep secret the truth behind his wartime service. He eventually became willing to share the reality with just one person: Reverend Thompson.No Ordinary Neighbour is the record of a growing relationship that led to an astonishing confession. Through a developing and deepening relationship, over the last decades of his life, Soldat X slowly disclosed his true identity in a protracted confession to the writer. He was, it transpires, one of the last surviving members of the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler.This is a story of guilt, regret, shame, anger, confusion, and a deep desire for others to hear of the ease with which evil can take hold of the human psyche and society. We are transported from an impoverished childhood in 1920s Berlin to training with the most elite unit within Himler’s SS. We travel with Soldat X on a troop train heading east to the killing fields of southern Ukraine in the autumn of 1941. After surviving two tours on the Russian front, which included experiencing some of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, Soldat X is part of the defence of Normandy following the D-Day landings 1944. Captured on the outskirts of Brussels in late summer 1944, Soldat X only just escaped being executed by a British guard in a Brussels cell, before being a PoW until late 1948.This account will shock and disturb, but not necessarily in the way many would expect or imagine. What is so surprising is how ordinary Soldat X was: he could so easily have been anyone’s favourite elderly uncle. This is no conventional memoir, it is a deep examination of how one young man, Soldat X, could so readily become immersed in a brutal military unit, one of the most feared of the Nazi regime.