Melita maschmann wiki

In our memoir-suffused culture, we can read about any experience under the sun. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a memoir about a Nazi trying to explain her choices in life — until now.

Fifty years after its initial publication, “Account Rendered,” written by Melita Maschmann, is being re-published. Over at the New Yorker’s website, Helen Epstein, the  publisher of the new edition, provides the backstory:

Before and during the Second World War, Maschmann worked in the high echelons of press and propaganda of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ section of the Nazi youth organization, and, later, she supervised the eviction of Polish farmers and the resettlement of ethnic Germans on their farms.

Arrested in 1945 at the age of twenty-seven, she completed a mandatory de-Nazification course and became a freelance journalist.

This was, by all accounts, one of the first and most popular accounts of a former Nazi accounting for her past, and