Window Into a Nazi We'd Never Heard Of

In 2011 an upholsterer in Amsterdam found a bundle of swastika-covered documents inside the cushion of an armchair he was repairing. The papers all belonged to Dr. Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart who had been an SS member working for the Reich in Nazi-Occupied Prague. Jana, the armchair’s Czech owner, did not recognise Griesinger. She had purchased the chair while a student in Prague in the 1960s, and it was one of the few objects she brought with her to the Netherlands in the 1980s, when she obtained permission for her family to leave Communist Czechoslovakia. As a professional historian of the Second World War, I was asked to investigate. I immediately set out to uncover more about this Dr. Griesinger, who was not mentioned in any books on occupied Prague or anywhere online. Did he survive the war? And, of course, how did his most precious documents end up hidden inside a chair, hundreds of miles from Prague and Stuttgart? The very ordinariness of this man who, like thousands of ordinary Nazis had vanished from the historical record, made him all the more intriguing to me. I wanted to see whether following the trajectory of an anonymous man could reveal anything new about life under the Third Reich.