As a 25-year-old legal trainee Sebastian Haffner experienced the assumption of power of Hitler in Berlin in 1933. He became a witness of a dramatic upheaval which changed also his life fundamentally. His best friend had to emigrate hastily, the love to a young Jewish woman broke up. Haffner himself could avoid the whirlpool from terror and seduction less and less. His life became a dangerous tightrope walk between adaptation and refusal. He emigrated to England in 1938. Decades after the war he was one of the most famous journalists of the Bonn republic.