1. Joachim Clemens Fest was a German historian, journalist, critic and editor who was best known for his writings and public commentary on Nazi Germany, including a biography of Adolf Hitler and books about Albert Speer and German resistance to Nazism.
Joachim Fest was a leading figure in the debate among German historians about the Nazi era.
In 1936, when Joachim Fest turned 10, his family refused to make him join the Hitler Youth, a step that could have had serious repercussions for the family although membership became compulsory only in 1939.
In December 1944, when he turned 18, Joachim Fest decided to enlist in the Wehrmacht, mainly to avoid being conscripted into the Waffen-SS.
Joachim Fest's father opposed even that concession by saying that "one does not volunteer for Hitler's criminal war".
In 1961, Joachim Fest was appointed editor-in-chief of television for the North German broadcasting service Norddeutscher Rundfunk in which he was responsible for the political television magazine Panorama.
Joachim Fest then embarked on his biography of Adolf Hitler, published in 1973.
Joachim Fest instead believed that the Third Reich's rise to power was the result of millions of Germans turning a blind eye to Hitler or actively supporting him.
Joachim Fest explained Hitler's success in terms of what he called the "great fear" that had overcome the German middle classes, as a result not only of Bolshevism and First World War dislocation but more broadly in response to rapid modernization, which had led to a romantic longing for a lost past.
In 1977, Joachim Fest directed a documentary entitled Hitler: A Career.
Joachim Fest served as the editorial aide for Albert Speer, Hitler's court architect and later Minister for Munitions, while Speer worked on his autobiography, Inside the Third Reich.
Joachim Fest acknowledged that many Germans had opposed the Nazi regime within the limits imposed on them by their circumstances.
Joachim Fest maintained his view most Germans had willfully refused to accept the truth about Nazism until it was too late.
In 2002, Joachim Fest published Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, a work that was based in part on available evidence following the opening of the Soviet archives but largely confirmed the account of Hitler's death given in Hugh Trevor-Roper's book The Last Days of Hitler.
Joachim Fest's views were generally conservative, pessimistic and sceptical, and he was particularly critical of the left-wing views that dominated German intellectual life from the late 1960s up to the collapse of communism in 1991.
Joachim Fest has been accused of helping Speer create legends about his role during the war.
Joachim Fest was lastly married to Ingrid Ascher and had two sons from a previous marriage and a daughter; all his children followed him into publishing or the media.
Joachim Fest died at his home in Kronberg im Taunus near Frankfurt am Main in 2006, the same year that his autobiography Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood was published.
Joachim Fest took the main title from an incident in his childhood when, at the age of ten, he and his brother were summoned to their father's study after he had been dismissed from his post as headmaster at a school.