What Was It Like to Be a 'Privileged' Nazi Prisoner?

In September 1944, while at the Ritz in Paris celebrating the city's liberation, Gertrude Legendre made the reckless decision to visit the front. She loved adventure and wanted to get close enough “to smell the fighting.” Together with three American intelligence officers, she set off for the German border village of Wallendorf, which they thought had been taken by the Allies. The idea was to “mosey up to the line,” as one of her companions put it, “so the lady could hear some gunfire.” When they arrived, they heard plenty of shots, but the shots were directed at them. The village had been retaken by the Nazis.

In “A Guest of the Reich,” his gripping account of Legendre's captivity by the Germans in World War II, Peter Finn brings to light an unfamiliar side of the Nazi regime. During her time as a prisoner, Mr. Finn tells us, Legendre discovered that there was “a parallel Nazi detention system whose relative privileges stood in stark contrast to the horrors and barbarism of the death camps.” Castles, private villas and hotels were used to detain high-ranking figures. “Eventually, the system housed hundreds of prisoners; members of several European royal families; German dissidents whom Hitler or Himmler didn't wish to be killed, at least not immediately.”