Raimund Pretzel (27 December 1907 – 2 January 1999), better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and historian. As an émigré in Britain during World War II, Haffner argued that accommodation was not only impossible with Adolf Hitler but also impossible with the German Reich with which Hitler had gambled. Peace could be secured only by rolling back history and restoring Germany to a network of smaller states. As a journalist in West Germany, Haffner's independence and penchant for provocation precipitated breaks with editors both liberal and conservative. His intervention in the Spiegel affair of 1962, and his contributions to the anti-fascist rhetoric of the student New Left, sharply raised his profile.
After parting ways with Stern magazine in 1975, Haffner produced widely read studies focused on what he saw as fateful continuities in the history of the German Reich (1871–1945). His posthumously published pre-war memoir, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 ("History of a German", published in English as Defying Hitler: A Memoir) (2003) won him new readers in Germany and abroad. His novel Abschied ("Parting"), published in 2025 after Haffner's children found the manuscript in his desk, reached the top of Der Spiegel's best-seller list after its debut.
Haffner was born in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel in Berlin. During war years, 1914–18, he attended the primary school (Volksschule) of which his father Carl Pretzel was the principal. Of these years he recalls not the privations, but the army bulletins read with the excitement of a football fan following match scores. Haffner believed that it was from this experience of war by a generation of schoolboys as a "game between nations", more enthralling and emotionally satisfying than anything peace could offer, that Nazism was to draw much of its "allure": "its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty towards internal opponents".
After the war Haffner attended first a city-centre grammar school, the Königstädtisches Gymnasium Berlin in Alexanderplatz. Here he befriended children of the city's leading Jewish families in business and the liberal professions. They were precocious, cultivated and left-leaning. His adolescent politics, however, took a turn rightward after he moved, in 1924, to the Schillergymnasium in Lichterfelde heavily subscribed to by families in the military. Haffner was later to remark that: "My whole life has been determined by my experiences in these two schools".
After January 1933, Haffner witnessed as a law student the deployment of the SA as an "auxiliary police force" and, after the March Reichstag fire, their hounding of Jewish and democratic jurists from the courts. What shocked him most in these events was the complete absence of "any act of courage or spirit". In the face of Hitler's ascent it seemed as if "a million individuals simultaneously suffered a nervous collapse". There was disbelief, but no resistance.
Doctoral research allowed Haffner to take refuge in Paris, but unable to gain a foothold in the city he returned to Berlin in 1934. Having already published some shorter fiction as a serial novelist for the Vossische Zeitung, he was able to make a living writing feuilletons for style magazines where "a certain cultural aesthetic exclusivity was tolerated" by the Nazis. But the tightening of political controls and, more immediately, the pregnancy of his journalist girlfriend, classed as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, urged emigration. In 1938 Erika Schmidt-Landry (née Hirsch) (1899-1969) was able to join a brother in England, and Haffner, on a commission from the Ullstein Press, was able to follow her. They married weeks before the birth of their son Oliver Pretzel.
Britain's declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 saved Haffner from deportation. As enemy aliens Haffner and his wife were interned, but in August 1940 they were among the first to be released from camps on the Isle of Man. In June, George Orwell's publisher Fredric Warburg had released Germany, Jekyll and Hyde, Haffner's first work in English and the first for which, to protect his family in Germany, he used the names he was to retain: Sebastian (from Johann Sebastian Bach) and Haffner (from Mozart's Haffner Symphony). In the House of Commons questions had been asked as to why the author of so important a book was being detained. Lord Vansittart described Haffner's analysis of "Hitlerism and the German problem" as "the most important [...] that has yet appeared".
In a polemic that rehearsed the themes of his later historical work, Haffner argued that Britain was naïve in declaring its "quarrel" to be with Hitler only and not with the German people. Hitler had "gained more adherents in Germany and come nearer to absolute power than anyone before him", and had done so by "more or less normal means of persuasion and attraction." This did not mean that "Hitler is Germany", but it was rash to assume that beneath Germany's vaunted unity there existed nothing but "discontent, secret opposition and repressed decency".
Germans had entered the war divided. Less than one in five were true devotees, the "real Nazis". No consideration, not even the "Bolshevik menace", could reconcile this "morally inaccessible" section of the New Germany to a stable Europe. The anti-Semitism that is their "badge" had outrun its original motive: the venting of Hitler's private resentments, the scapegoating of a minority as a safety valve for anti-capitalist sentiment. It functions rather as "a means of selection and trial", identifying those who are prepared, without pretext, to persecute, hunt and murder and thus be bound to the Leader by "the iron chains of a common crime". Hitler, in turn, (a "potential suicide par excellence") recognises only devotion to his own person.
A greater number of Germans—perhaps four in ten—wish only to see the back of Hitler and the Nazis. But "unorganised, dispirited and often in despair", very few identified with the submerged political opposition, itself divided and confused. Side-by-side they live with a roughly equal number of Germans who, dreading a further Versailles, bear "the surrender of personality, religion and private life" under Hitler as a "patriotic sacrifice". Through their generals, these Reich loyalists might eventually seek terms with the Allies, but Haffner urged caution. Anything less than a decisive break with the status quo ante would merely return to "a latent and passive state" the Reich's animating spirit of aggrandisement and "vulgar worship of force".
For there to be security in Europe, Haffner insisted (in original italics) that "[The] German Reich must disappear, and the last seventy-five years of Germany history must be erased. The Germans must retrace their steps to the point where they took the wrong path--to the year 1866" (the year when, on the battlefield of Königgrätz, Prussia removed Austrian protection from the smaller German states). Articulating a thesis he was to defend at length in his last (dictated) work, Von Bismarck zu Hitler (1987), Haffner maintained that "No peace is conceivable with the Prussian Reich which was born at that time, and whose last logical expression is no other than Nazi Germany". Germany should be returned to an historical pattern of regional states bound by confederal arrangements that are European and not exclusively national.
At the same time, Haffner admitted that part of the attraction for Germans would be that, repurposed as Bavarians, Rhinelanders and Saxons, they might escape Allied retribution. "We cannot", he reasoned, "both get rid of the German Reich and, identifying its 'Succession States', punish them for its sins". If the Allies wished the Reich mentality to die--"of which there was every possibility after the catastrophe of Nazism"—then the new states had to be given "a fair chance".
There was a story that Churchill ordered every member of his war cabinet to read Haffner's book. If true, the regard would have been mutual. Of all his subsequent works, Haffner was to say that his short biography, Winston Churchill (1967), was his favourite. When in 1965 Churchill died, Sebastian Haffner wrote "it seemed as if not a mere mortal was buried, but English history itself". Yet Haffner was disappointed that Churchill did not take up his ideas for a German Freedom Legion, a German academy in exile and a German committee. The Prime Minister was prepared to use anti-Nazi Germans as advisors, technical experts and agents in the special forces, but there was to be no London equivalent of the Moscow-based "National Committee for a Free Germany". Neal Ascherson nonetheless believes it possible that some of Churchill's ideas about post-war Germany had "roots in sections of Haffner's book".