Suddenly an Englishman

The vivid and candid autobiography of Louis Hagen, alongside his bestselling Arnhem Lift

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‘England is my home, and if someone asks me what I am – German, Norwegian, Jewish or British – I answer, “I’m an Englishman.”’

In 1934, aged just 16, Louis Hagen was sent to Lichtenberg concentration camp after being betrayed for an off-hand joke by a Nazi-sympathising family maid. Mercifully, his time there was cut short thanks to the intervention of a school friend’s father, and he escaped to the UK soon after. ‘The Life of Louis Hagen’ follows his adventures across the globe and the characters he met along the way, from the founder of the NHS to a Nobel Prize winner to one of the earliest animated-film directors, all told in lively and unflinching detail.

Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, 1,400 were killed and more than 6,000 were captured – a bloody disaster in more ways than one. ‘Arnhem Lift’ is Hagen’s breathtaking and frank account of what it was like in the air and on the ground, including his daring escape from the German Army by swimming the Rhine. Indeed, it was so honest that Hagen found himself banished to India by his shocked commanding officer soon after its initial publication in 1945.

Suddenly an Englishman is the complete story of the remarkable Louis Hagen, a German Jew who survived a concentration camp to become a decorated glider pilot in the British Army Air Corps. His first book, Arnhem Lift, was the earliest published account of the Battle of Arnhem while his accompanying autobiography remained unpublished – until now.