A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Führer's Last Days

In Hitler's Bunker

Armin D Lehmann became an active and outspoken pacifist and peacemaker in his adult life. He lived in Oregon until his death in 2012. 
 
Tim Carroll is a national newspaper journalist and television producer. His last book was a critically acclaimed biography of the director Woody Allen. He is married with two children and lives in London.

During the last months of Hitler's Berlin, an estimated 30,000 German teenagers perished defending their beloved Fhrer in the Russian onslaught. Armin Lehmann was one of the few boy soldiers who escaped the bloodbath. Like every other member of the Hitler Youth, Armin would have given his life gladly for his leader, but he was not to be sacrificed to the enemy at the gate. Instead, he was chosen to serve in the German High Command's bunker complex. It was a stroke of fate that brought him into the company of the most notorious Nazis of Hitler's hated Reich, including Martin Bormann, Goebbels and, of course, the Fhrer himself. When Hitler greeted Armin, the 16-year-old boy knew he had been granted a unique part in history.In Hitler's Bunker is Armin's eyewitness account of the Nazi apocalypse. It is also the story of how his unquestioning fanaticism won him that role in the final act of the Third Reich. It takes us back to his boyhood and the brutal SS father who instilled the Nazi's hateful creed in his son. It follows Armin's odyssey through the ranks of the Hitler Youth and shares his teenage anguish over his doomed love for a beautiful German nurse. It is the story of Armin's gradual realisation of the full horror of what he had been part of, and recounts his quest for the truth, which took him in the footsteps of Mahatma Ghandi and to a meeting with Albert Schweitzer, the missionary and theologian. Above all, In Hitler's Bunker is the story of how one man, instead of running away from his past, confronted it and found peace, at last.

The Full Story of the Second World War's Most Remarkable Mass Escape

The Great Escapers

Tim Carroll is a national newspaper journalist and television producer. He wrote the critically acclaimed biography of the director Woody Allen, Woody and his Women, and was co-author of In Hitler's Bunker. He is married with two children and lives in London.

The Great Escape was one of the most remarkable episodes of the Second World War. After the attempt to break 200 men out of Hermann Gring's 'escape-proof' prisoner-of-war camp, 76 Allied officers managed to create havoc behind enemy lines before most were eventually recaptured. Now, over 60 years after the event, the ingenuity of the masterminds behind this audacious break-out is celebrated.The Great Escapers tells the story of these men who managed to break free from the supposedly impenetrable barbed wire and watchtowers of Stalag Luft III, Gring's showcase prison camp near Sagan. Some of them were also involved in other daring escape attempts, including the famous Wooden Horse episode, also turned into a classic film, and the little-known Sachsenhausen break-out, engineered by five Great Escape survivors sent to die in the notorious concentration camp on Hitler's personal orders. Also revealed is the important role Stalag Luft III played in Allied intelligence operations within occupied Europe: the prisoners developed an intricate espionage network, feeding details of military deployments and strength levels back home and relaying details about the accuracy of bombing raids. Tragically, 50 of those involved in the Great Escape were murdered by the Gestapo. The author examines their deaths and the post-war investigation to bring their killers to justice. The Great Escapers is an extraordinary story, charted through the experiences of those who lived under the sweeping searchlights of the ominous watchtowers and ending with accounts from the seven remaining men who broke out that March night over 60 years ago - the last of the Great Escapers.

Tim Carroll

Tim Carroll has done a superb job in tracking down a mine of entertaining information on this unjustly forgotten figure

The biography of a swashbuckling adventurer right out of the pages of an Ian Fleming novel

Carroll has drawn on half a century's research - but he's also had the perspective that the passage of time can bring

The Extraordinary Story of Churchill's Cousin and the Great Escape

The Dodger is the long-awaited story of Johnny Dodge, a wartime hero and a pivotal figure in the escapade immortalised in the legendary Hollywood film The Great Escape. 
 
Of all the Allied prisoners who broke out of Hermann Göring's 'escape proof' camp in the famous episode of March 1944, Johnny Dodge was the most intriguing. American-born Dodge was a cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill. When the Second World War broke out, he volunteered for the Army but was quickly captured after the debacle of Dunkirk. He became a prisoner of war and an inveterate escapologist and troublemaker - eventually becoming one of the ringleaders of the 'Great Escape'. 
 
 Surviving the murderous Gestapo, he was thrown into a VIP compound of Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the orders of Heinrich Himmler - but escaped once more. After recapture, Johnny was spirited away by the SS to a meeting in Berlin with Hitler's interpreter, who sent him on a clandestine mission to his cousin in Downing Street. His odyssey through the dying embers of the Third Reich to Switzerland and freedom in the company of a louche Nazi apparatchik is the last curious escapade in the story of Johnny's adventurous life. 
 
 The Dodger draws upon Dodge's voluminous private papers, including photographs taken inside prison camps and letters home, casting revealing new light on the myth of the Great Escape.

Tim Carroll

Praise for The Dodger

Book of the week

Tim Carroll has done a superb job in tracking down a mine of entertaining information on this unjustly forgotten figure

The biography of a swashbuckling adventurer right out of the pages of an Ian Fleming novel

Book of the week

Tim Carroll has done a superb job in tracking down a mine of entertaining information on this unjustly forgotten figure

The biography of a swashbuckling adventurer right out of the pages of an Ian Fleming novel

Book of the week

Tim Carroll has done a superb job in tracking down a mine of entertaining information on this unjustly forgotten figure

The biography of a swashbuckling adventurer right out of the pages of an Ian Fleming novel

Books by Tim Carroll

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