Watching the ranks closing

William Russell was a young American who worked as a clerk in the US embassy in Berlin at the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. When Berlin Embassy, his account of those epic times appeared in 1941, it was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Little is known of what became of Russell after his return to America in 1940 and his book has been out of print for over 40 years. But thanks to the enterprise of the London-based publishers Elliott & Thompson, we can once again hear the cool, almost laconic, voice of the fun- loving 24-year-old as he calmly elucidates the horror and farce of an era now shrouded by a haze of revisionist history and political correctness.

Russell was the junior member of a team who worked incessantly for two years processing the avalanche of visa applications to the United States precipitated by the ever more relentless Nazi persecution of German Jews.