Joachim Fest - Early Career

Early Career

Fest was born in Berlin, the son of Johannes Fest, a conservative Roman Catholic and strongly anti-Nazi schoolteacher who was dismissed from his position when the Nazis came to power in 1933. In 1936, when Fest turned ten, his family refused to make him join the Hitler Youth, a step which could have had serious consequences, although membership did not become compulsory until 1939. As it was, Fest was expelled from his school, and then went to a Catholic boarding school in Freiburg im Breisgau in Baden: here he was able to avoid Hitler Youth service until he was 18.

The fact that his father, an "ordinary German," had understood the nature of the Nazi regime, and had resisted it, coloured Fest's view of his fellow Germans for the rest of his life. He never accepted that Germans had not known what Hitler was doing or that they could not have resisted the Nazi regime.

In December 1944, when he turned 18, Fest decided to enlist in the Wehrmacht, mainly to avoid being conscripted into the Waffen SS. His father opposed even this concession, saying that "one does not volunteer for Hitler's criminal war." His military service in World War II was brief and ended when he was made a prisoner of war in France. After the war he studied law, history, sociology, German literature, and art history at Freiburg, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin.

On graduating he started work for the American-run Berlin radio station RIAS (Radio In the American Sector), where from 1954 to 1961 he was editor in charge of contemporary history. During this time he was asked to present radio portraits of the main historical personalities influencing Germany from Bismarck to World War II, including such senior figures of the Nazi regime as Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. These portraits were later published as his first book The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. In 1961 Fest was appointed editor-in-chief of television for the North German broadcasting service Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), where he was also responsible for the political magazine Panorama. He resigned after a disagreement with left-wingers who eventually came to dominate the magazine.