Dorothy May, Freiburg Letters: an Englishwoman in the Third Reich Writes to her Missing Husband, 1942-1946

Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2023. Book. Fine. Soft cover. 1st Edition. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall. A fine, new copy. When Dorothy May died in 2003, her neighbours knew that she possessed 'something of great value' in her bureau. Jeweller Michael Bassett was expecting gemstones, but instead he found a stack of some 250 letters and a 'guest book'. Between 1938 and 1946, Dorothy, as a young music-teacher, left Lancashire, married Paul May - stage-manager of the State Theatre in Freiburg - and set up home there at the height of the Third Reich. Paul was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1942, and by New Year he was at Stalingrad ... and soon lost to sight. Dorothy's letters to her husband, written in English, recording her daily round, soon started to arrive back marked 'return to Sender'. To maintain her spirits, she continued to write to him, but she did not post the letters, and thus they became a diary of an isolated Englishwoman in a hostile city, beneath her compatriot's bombs, as she cautiously negotiated relationships with fellow citizens and the state. She continued to write and when she departed for England in late 1946 for medical treatment, she left the letters in their bomb-damaged flat, for Paul to read on his hoped-for return from Russia. Some months later she returned to collect them, unread by Paul, and they were locked away - awaiting rediscovery only after her death. 197 of the letters have been edited with editorial comments. Foreword by Sir Max Hastings and a German foreword by Dietrich Elchlepp. 20 photographs and maps and an index.