Edgar Feuchtwanger, a German-born British historian who, as a Jewish child in 1930s Munich, had an intimate view of the rise of the Nazi Party through the daily life of one of his closest neighbors, Adolf Hitler, died on Aug. 22 at his home in Winchester, England, southwest of London. He was 100.
His daughter Antonia Cox confirmed the death.
Dr. Feuchtwanger (pronounced FOISHT-vanger) was just 5 in 1929 when Hitler used the proceeds from his best-selling political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” to buy a nine-room apartment across the street from his family in their upscale Munich neighborhood.
The Feuchtwangers were a prominent family of Bavarian Jews: Edgar’s father, Ludwig, was a lawyer and book publisher; his uncle, Lion, was among the country’s best-known playwrights and novelists and an acidic critic of the Nazis whose 1930 book, “Success,” skewered the party and its leader.
Yet Hitler seemed to have no idea that the family lived directly across from him.
Dr. Feuchtwanger recalled one encounter, not long after Hitler won election as chancellor in 1933.
“Just as we passed his front door, Hitler came out, wearing a mackintosh and a trilby hat,” he told The New York Times in 2016. “There were some people in the street who shouted ‘Heil Hitler.’ Then he looked at me and my nanny, quite benevolently.”
Hitler got into his car, oblivious.
“If he had known who I was, it would have been quite different,” Dr. Feuchtwanger said.
In his memoir, “Hitler, My Neighbor,” published first in French in 2012 and then in English in 2017, Dr. Feuchtwanger wrote that most of his recollections of his neighbor were banal — seeing him lounging in a garden, for example — with little premonition of what he would become.
His father, Dr. Feuchtwanger told the British newspaper the Guardian in May, “regarded Hitler as very dangerous, he saw him as someone to be made fun of. Hitler was supposed to continue as a ridiculous figure, and then he would somehow disappear from the scene.”
His father’s attitude began to change as their neighbor consolidated control over the country. Though he worked in Berlin, Hitler returned to Munich on most weekends; when he did, a fleet of six-wheeled Mercedes limousines would pull up to the apartment building, with the first floor now taken over by SS bodyguards.
One early morning in June 1934, Edgar awoke to the sound of slamming car doors and peeling tires. He looked out his bedroom window to see jackbooted Nazi officers scurrying about, pushing people into waiting cars.
It was, he soon realized, the beginning of the purge that came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler ordered the murder of at least 85 Nazi officials whom he considered a threat to his power.
Four years later, he saw Hitler emerge from his building to greet a crowd of saluting Germans, then mount the front passenger seat of an open-top car. He was off to Vienna to lead the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria.
By then, Edgar’s father had been pushed out of his job, and the family had been forced to let its domestic staff go, because the 1935 Nuremberg race laws forbade non-Aryans from employing people, among other restrictions.
In November 1938, days after the deadly nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, Ludwig Feuchtwanger was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, which at the time was used for political prisoners. To his family’s surprise, he was released six weeks later, his head shaved and his body bruised.
An uncle quickly arranged for a family visa to Britain. Edgar, an only child, went first, in early 1939, and lived with a family in Cornwall for three months before his mother and father joined him.
The rest of his family made it out as well, save for one. His favorite aunt, Bella Traubkatz, was captured by the Nazis and died in 1943 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague.
Edgar Joseph Feuchtwanger was born on Sept. 28, 1924, in Munich. His mother, Erna (Rheinstrom) Feuchtwanger, was a pianist.
After fleeing Germany, the Feuchtwanger family settled in southern England. During World War II, Edgar worked for the national forestry service, felling trees in Scotland.
He studied history at the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1947. Afterward he taught adult education at the University of Southampton while also pursuing a Ph.D. there in British history. After he received his doctorate in 1958, he joined the university’s history department, where he taught until retiring in 1989.
Dr. Feuchtwanger married Primrose Essame, the daughter of a British major general, in 1962. She died in 2012.
Along with their daughter Antonia, he is survived by their two other children, Adrian and Judith Feuchtwanger; and three grandchildren.
As a historian, Dr. Feuchtwanger wrote books on 19th-century British politics, including well-regarded biographies of the prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. He also wrote extensively about German diplomatic history and established academic exchange programs with German universities.
In recognition of such work, he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country’s highest civilian honor, in 2003. He was made a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2021.
With help from his daughter Antonia, he wrote “Kinderbriefe aus dem Exil: Edgar Feuchtwanger in England 1939” (2024), a collection of his wartime letters to his parents. The volume is scheduled to be published in English next year.
While he made no secret of his childhood encounters with Hitler, Dr. Feuchtwanger did not write about them extensively until he published “Hitler, My Neighbor,” which he wrote with the French journalist Bertil Scali.
The book received positive reviews, though some critics found fault with Dr. Feuchtwanger for not underlining the future horrors that would be brought about by his infamous neighbor.
But that, Dr. Feuchtwanger noted, was exactly the point. He and his family did not know what was in store; all they knew was what they saw across the street.
“He was actually just an ordinary person,” he told The Guardian. “There was nothing special about him.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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