The Nazi next door: inside my grandmother’s house

Each time I return to Hamburg (about once a year, on average) I pay a sentimental visit to my grandmother’s magnificent old house, where she spent her cosseted, idyllic youth, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

It’s a robust Teutonic villa, a bombastic relic of the Gründerzeit – that flamboyant building boom which followed Bismarck’s triumphant unification of Germany. It’s on one of Hamburg’s smarter streets, a leafy avenue called Heimhuderstrasse – but it’s not the ornate architecture that draws me there, or even the snob value of the neighbourhood. What brings me back year after year are the stories that cling to this house like ivy – stories from the life my German grandmother lived before I knew her, before and during the second world war.

Born in 1916, my grandma, Ursula Emma Frieda Lilly Lampert, spent a happy, pampered childhood here.