**Chap­ter Sum­ma­ry:**

In this chap­ter, Howard W. Camp­bell, Jr. recounts sig­nif­i­cant moments from his ear­ly life in Sch­enec­tady, New York, where he was born on Feb­ru­ary 16, 1912. His father, an engi­neer with Gen­er­al Elec­tric, was rarely home due to the demands of his job in the Ser­vice Engi­neer­ing Depart­ment, which involved the instal­la­tion and main­te­nance of heavy equip­ment glob­al­ly. Camp­bell reflects on his father’s sin­gle interest—an enor­mous pic­ture book on the First World War. The sig­nif­i­cance of this book is some­what of a mys­tery, as his father dis­cour­aged him from view­ing it, stat­ing it wasn’t for chil­dren. Nev­er­the­less, the young Camp­bell secret­ly looked at the dis­turb­ing images with­in, which fore­shad­owed his lat­er expe­ri­ences.

His moth­er, Vir­ginia Crock­er, was an ama­teur cel­list and house­wife, who Camp­bell describes as a beau­ti­ful yet trou­bled indi­vid­ual. With a ten­den­cy toward alco­holism, she often cre­at­ed strange demon­stra­tions, such as a fire involv­ing a mix­ture of rub­bing alco­hol and salt, which ter­ri­fied her son, lead­ing to a break­ing of their bond. That peri­od marked a shift in their rela­tion­ship, as she with­drew, fear­ful of her own eccen­tric­i­ties.

In 1923, Campbell’s father was assigned to Berlin, lead­ing to a sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tion in his life—he adopt­ed the Ger­man lan­guage, made friends, and even­tu­al­ly became a play­wright, mar­ry­ing Hel­ga Noth, the daugh­ter of a Berlin police chief. Unlike his par­ents, who left Ger­many as World War II approached in 1939, Camp­bell remained. He became a writer and broad­cast­er for Nazi pro­pa­gan­da, rec­og­nized as an expert on Amer­i­can issues with­in the Min­istry of Pop­u­lar Enlight­en­ment and Pro­pa­gan­da.

His life took a dra­mat­ic turn toward the end of the war when he was cap­tured by Lieu­tenant Bernard B. O’Hare of the Amer­i­can Third Army on April 12, 1945. Found in mufti, he was tak­en to Ohrdruf, where he was con­front­ed with the stark real­i­ties of the Nazi death camps. Faced with the gal­lows designed for exe­cu­tions, the grim sight of six dead guards left a last­ing impact on Camp­bell, who antic­i­pat­ed his own exe­cu­tion. A pho­to­graph cap­tur­ing him dur­ing this moment became famed, near­ly award­ing a Pulitzer Prize for its haunt­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the com­plex­i­ties of his past and the war he had been a part of.