This statement, from another time, shaped into an accusation, opens the printed version of the third act of a play written by a thirty-two-year-old German author who as a child had been a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a Hitler youth group, the young members of which, in 1943, were set to collect leaflets dropped from Allied planes telling the Germans of the extermination of the Jews.

Rolf Hochhuth was born in 1931 in Eschwege, in Northern Hesse, the son of a man who worked in a shoe factory founded by his great-grandfather. That father had served in the First World War and went on, briefly, to serve in the second. Rolf met his wife-to-be while still at school. Her mother, a Social Democrat councillor, was removed by the Nazis, imprisoned and decapitated. Her father died while serving in the Wehrmacht.

Rolf's parents were anti-Nazi but had to keep their views to themselves. Their son, by contrast, looked for the German victory that they feared. Where W. G. Sebald protested that postwar Germans were silent about the catastrophe they had suffered, Hochhuth would be one of those who broke that silence, in 1964 observing that 'because of the bombing of the Allies, we hated the Allies … the English destroyed Kassel.