How Did Hitler Shape Jared Diamond's Life?

Jared Diamond says his life and his wife's life were formed under the shadow of Hitler. He was born in 1937 and grew up through World War II in the United States. He was not bombed and he was not orphaned, but every day he can remember was formed by the war.

His first memory is the first photo the United States Army released of dead American soldiers, a famous Life magazine cover of two soldiers dead face down in New Guinea. His family is Jewish from Eastern Europe, and the last of his family disappeared in the Holocaust. He married into a Polish family. His wife's parents came to the United States in 1948. His wife's mother survived Auschwitz. Other members of her family did not.

Other leaders shaped his life mostly for the good. He once left a rubber hose water pump running all night to dry radioactive isotopes. The pump broke and flooded his lab and the lab below, the lab of Lord Adrian, father-in-law of his thesis advisor and master of his college. The next morning Sir Brian Matthews, chair of the Cambridge Physiology Department, called. Diamond thought he would be expelled. Matthews said the flood was sloppy and told him not to do it again, so a leader who could have ended his career did not. His interest in leaders starts with Hitler, and with whether his family in Eastern Europe and his wife's family would still be alive if Hitler had not existed.