Egon Hanfstaengl was born on February 3, 1921, in New York City as the son of Ernst Hanfstaengl and Helene Hanfstaengl, née Niemeyer. Hitler became his godfather. He had a sister, Hertha, who died at the age of 5. He received his school education in England and Germany, where he also joined the
Hitler Youth. An American citizen by birth, he returned to the United States for his university education. As the son of a prominent former top official of the
NSDAP, about whom the American press reported regularly, Hanfstaengl also came into the focus of the reporting. The
New York Times announced the admission of the 18-year-old to
Harvard University. The newspaper also reported that he volunteered for the
United States Army Air Corps in early 1941. The news about Hanfstaengl's entry into the
US Army also received attention from
Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels; he made a corresponding entry in his diary. Journalist
John Franklin Carter, who, as a consultant to
US President Franklin Roosevelt, had psychological assessments prepared of some Nazi leaders, also asked Hanfstaengl's father and his son. When Hanfstaengl started working on a book about the Hitler Youth, Roosevelt, who knew his father, Ernst Hanfstaengl, from studying in Harvard, spontaneously dictated several paragraphs for a foreword, according to Carter's report. According to American records, Hanfstaengl offered Roosevelt to travel to Hitler in the
Berghof near
Berchtesgaden, in 1943 to attack him, but the White House ignored this suggestion. After
World War II, Hanfstaengl was a lecturer in European and American history at
Brooklyn College in New York. He was the managing director of the art and publishing house
Franz Hanfstaengl in
Munich, from 1958 until its dissolution in 1980. As the godchild of Adolf Hitler, he appeared in several
documentaries about Hitler. He died on March 21, 2007, at the age of 86. == Literature ==