During the writing of I Was Hitler’s Baker I incorporated several episodes that my mother related to me of her childhood in Denmark. She told me how she and her brother and sister had placed coins on a railroad track to have them flattened by a passing train. (What they did with these coins, I do not know.) I used this image to flesh out Adolf Hitler’s childhood, and showed young Adolf placing pfennigs on a railroad track and afterward inscribing on them his first crude rendition of a swastika, a symbol that would eventually come to represent the Nazi party and the Third Reich.

Mother described to me how she had dared her siblings to follow her as she balanced with her arms outstretched along the top rail of a fence. This was my inspiration for having young Adolf play a game of follow the leader and goad his little retinue into walking along the top handrail of a railroad bridge that spanned the Danube.

Thanks to my mother I have a first-hand account of German radio broadcasts during the 1940s. Hitler’s rambling speeches were carried over the Nazi-controlled Danish radio. So I know what Josef and his family must have heard when they turned on their radio in Munich.

My father’s experiences during World War II also found their way into I Was Hitler’s Baker. Sergeant Bob Peterson drove an M-4 tank across France during the winter of 1944-1945, at the same time that German troops were marching into Russia without proper winter clothing or footgear. My father’s description of that harsh winter served to portray in my mind what the ill-equipped German troops were up against.

The newsreels that Josef and Freya watched during this winter never revealed how perilous the situation was for the German soldiers as they advanced deeper and deeper into Russia. But from my father’s description of how he had stuffed newspapers under his jacket to keep out the cold, and placed his wet socks atop a stove to dry them out, I was able to provide a convincing description of one of the worst winters in a century, which decimated Hitler’s
troops, and no doubt changed the course of the war.