Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler is the book's principal absent antagonist: a figure seldom seen in person but felt everywhere in the narrator's family life, wartime routines, bodily anxieties, and historical memory. His actions turn an ordinary Sunday, school preparations, business hopes, leisure, fashion, and childbirth into parts of a national ordeal. The narrative presents him not as a psychologically intimate character but as a remote political force whose decisions reach into domestic rooms and whose defeat makes possible the narrator's cautious return to hope.

Hitler and the Outbreak of War

Hitler first appears through the radio broadcast that interrupts a crowded Sunday morning at the family hotel. The narrator, her Mother, and her Father listen with farm workers, businessmen, the chef, and chambermaids as Neville Chamberlain announces that Germany has invaded Poland and that Britain is now at war with Germany. The announcement confirms fears that had gathered for months and destroys the complacent promise of “peace in our time.” The room falls into stunned silence, while somebody tries to soften the shock by predicting that the conflict will be over by Christmas.

That prediction becomes one of the book's sharpest ironies. Instead of a brief crisis, the war brings six Christmases of fear, shortages, and deprivation. Hitler therefore enters the narrative as the agent of a historical rupture: he does not merely alter diplomatic relations, but removes the narrator's expected future. At the time, the narrator is chiefly worried about returning to school, assembling a uniform and books, and facing the School Certificate. The text later reveals that Hitler will soon remove the need for, and the worry attached to, all of those plans, making the collapse of adolescence an early measure of his reach.

The Political Force Behind Private Lives

Hitler's influence extends backward as well as forward through the family's history. When the narrator's parents undertake a confident new business venture, they believe the Depression has ended and that prosperity is returning. Their plans are shaped by optimism, stylish surroundings, and the expectation that the enterprise will make their fortune. Yet the narrative places those hopes beside the image of the short, moustachioed Austrian who is already building the foundations of the Third Reich hundreds of miles away in Germany. The contrast gives Hitler a structural role in the story: he is the distant force that makes private confidence vulnerable to events the family cannot yet imagine.

This distance does not make him insignificant. It makes his power more unsettling. The family's business, education, security, and expectations are not destroyed by a personal encounter with Hitler, but by political decisions radiating outward from his regime. The book repeatedly measures history through domestic consequences, showing how an apparently remote dictator becomes present in the choices ordinary people must make, the goods they cannot obtain, and the future they are forced to postpone.

War, Bombing, and the Attempt to Break Britain

As the Second World War intensifies, Hitler's presence becomes associated with deliberate attacks on civilian morale. London endures continuous nightly bombing intended to break the population's spirit, but the plan fails. Hitler then turns toward the provinces. During the bombing of Coventry on November 14, 1940, the narrator's community can see the glow of the fires from forty miles away. The bombardment continues for hours in successive waves, and the medieval city burns while many thousands die in their homes.

The attack is presented as more than a military operation. Hitler uses a German travel guide to identify some of England's most beautiful cities, targeting architectural heritage as well as the people living among it. Bath, Canterbury, York, Norwich, and Exeter are named alongside Coventry as places whose cityscapes are altered by the campaign. The intended destruction is therefore cultural and emotional as well as physical: the attack seeks to make the population surrender by damaging what it cherishes. Instead, shared misery draws people closer together. Hitler's strategy creates devastation, but its desired political result does not follow.

The same war also divides families through the evacuation of children into the countryside. These separations are meant to protect the young from bombing, yet the narrative notes that some continue to damage family relations in later years. Hitler's violence thus produces consequences beyond the immediate blast or raid. It reorganizes households, interrupts attachments, and leaves wounds whose duration exceeds the military event itself.

Ideology, Gender, and Defiance

Hitler's authority is also represented through the regime's demands upon women's appearance. The narrator and Gloria, unable to buy stockings, stain their legs with liquid leg makeup and draw imitation seams with black eye pencil. When lipstick becomes scarce, they melt the stubs of several old lipsticks in an eggcup set in a pan of water, then pour the mixture back into a container. The result is greasy, uneven, and sometimes an odd colour, but the improvised cosmetics express both wartime scarcity and determination to preserve glamour.

Only later do the women understand that their enthusiasm for wartime red lips and makeup directly opposed Hitler's preferred image of women from the so-called Aryan race. He detests what is not natural and insists that women wear no makeup, lipstick, or nail varnish; they are also not to dye or perm their hair, wear high heels, or diet to lose weight. The narrator turns these rules into an ideological contrast. Makeup, lipstick, improvised stockings, and feminine display become small acts of refusal against the “well-scrubbed Brunhilda-look” associated with his racial ideal. The joke about having no need to diet while working hard on limited rations carries a double edge: scarcity is real, but the women reclaim the visible presentation of their bodies from an authoritarian programme of regulation.

Death, Exposure, and Historical Judgment

From the moment war is declared, Hitler's earlier use of gas in the previous war makes a renewed gas attack seem possible. Britain responds by issuing gas masks to men, women, and children, each supplied in a cardboard box with a string strap and required to be carried at all times. Even entry to the cinema depends on having one. The gas mask becomes a concrete domestic reminder of Hitler's potential methods: fear is carried as an everyday object, attached to the body, and taken into spaces intended for entertainment.

The narrative's final decisive reversal comes in 1945. Twenty days after the narrator gives birth to a daughter on April 10, the family learns that Hitler has taken his own life on April 30. His death coincides with the collapse of the world he built, but it does not erase what that world has done. Broadcast reports by Richard Dimbleby from Bergen-Belsen reveal concentration-camp conditions in which thousands of people, many of them Jewish, were transported, stripped of their possessions, and systematically murdered by the Nazis through gassing or starvation. Survivors are described as walking skeletons, while bodies remain unburied; the account identifies this exterminatory policy as Hitler's Final Solution and connects it to his idea of Aryan perfection.

The discovery of these crimes changes the meaning of victory. Film footage later shows the conditions inflicted on the prisoners, while German civilians are forced into cinemas to witness what their leader and his henchmen had done. The narrator insists that the war came close to ending differently and asks what the future would have been had Hitler succeeded. The answer is not supplied as speculation but as a relieved historical verdict: he did not succeed, and Britain and its allies are the victors. Hitler's ending is therefore both a personal suicide and the defeat of a political project whose effects have reached from the family hotel to bombed cities, controlled bodies, divided households, and the extermination camps of Europe.