[2] As a journalist in West Germany, Haffner's conscious effort "to dramatize, to push differences to the top",[3] precipitated breaks with editors both liberal and conservative.

After parting ways with Stern magazine in 1975, Haffner produced widely read studies focussed on what he saw as fateful continuities in the history of the German Reich (1871–1945).

Haffner believed that it was from this experience of war by a generation of schoolboys as a "game between nations", more enthralling and emotionally satisfying than anything peace could offer, that Nazism was to draw much of its "allure": "its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty towards internal opponents".

[7] After January 1933, Haffner witnessed as a law student the deployment of the SA as an "auxiliary police force" and, after the March Reichstag fire, their hounding of Jewish and democratic jurists from the courts.

Having already published some shorter fiction as a serial novelist for the Vossische Zeitung, he was able to make a living writing feuilletons for style magazines where "a certain cultural aesthetic exclusivity was tolerated" by the Nazis.

It functions rather as "a means of selection and trial", identifying those who are prepared, without pretext, to persecute, hunt and murder and thus be bound to the Leader by "the iron chains of a common crime".

Side-by-side they live with a roughly equal number of Germans who, dreading a further Versailles, bear "the surrender of personality, religion and private life" under Hitler as a "patriotic sacrifice".

Anything less than a decisive break with the status quo ante would merely return to "a latent and passive state" the Reich's animating spirit of aggrandisement and "vulgar worship of force".

Articulating a thesis he was to defend at length in his last (dictated) work, Von Bismarck zu Hitler (1987), Haffner maintained that "No peace is conceivable with the Prussian Reich which was born at that time, and whose last logical expression is no other than Nazi Germany".

The Prime Minister was prepared to use anti-Nazi Germans as advisors, technical experts and agents in the special forces, but there was to be no London equivalent of the Moscow-based "National Committee for a Free Germany".

[20] In 1941 David Astor invited Haffner to join The Observer as political correspondent, while Edward Hulton recruited him as contributor to the popular Picture Post.

Through the so-called Shanghai Club (named after a restaurant in Soho), he associated with left-leaning and emigre journalists, among them E. H. Carr, George Orwell, Isaac Deutscher, Barbara Ward and Jon Kimche[21] On his return from war service, David Astor took a more active part in editorial matters, and there were clashes of opinion.

Following a McCarthy-era trip to the United States, Haffner had soured on the North Atlantic alliance,[22] and (with Paul Sethe of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)[23] he was unwilling to dismiss as bluff the March 1952 Stalin Note with its offer of Soviet withdrawal in return for German neutrality.

The publisher Axel Springer permitted discussion of neutrality (the "Austrian solution ") as the basis for a final German settlement,[25] a prospect not definitively dismissed until the construction in September 1961 of the Berlin Wall.

Haffner joined Springer in railing against the ineffectiveness of the western allied response to the sealing of the Soviet Bloc in Germany, a stance that occasioned his final break with Astor and The Observer.

Defence minister Franz Josef Strauss levelled accusations of treason (Landesverrat) in respect of an article detailing a NATO projection of "imaginable chaos" in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike and criticising the Government's lack of preparedness.

Identified with what was to be seen a key turning point in the culture of the Federal Republic away from deference demanded by the old Obrigkeitsstaat (authoritarian state)[32] Haffner found a new, and more liberal, readership with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and with the weeklies Die Zeit and Stern magazine.

[24] Together with young writers and activists of a new post-war generation, Haffner believed that the Federal Republic was paying a price for Adenauer's pragmatic refusal to press for an accounting of Nazi-era crimes.

With implicit reference to these, in Stern Haffner denounced as "a systematic, cold-blooded, planned pogrom" a police riot in West Berlin in which a student protester, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead.

[33] On June 2, 1967, rallied by Ulrike Meinhof's exposure in the New Left journal konkret of German complicity in the Pahlavi dictatorship, students had demonstrated against the visit of the Shah of Iran.

[34] Contributing himself to konkret (later revealed to have been subsidised by the East Germans)[35] Haffner wrote that "with the Student pogrom of 2 June 1967 fascism in West Berlin had thrown off its mask".

[36][37] Increasingly focussed on the war in Vietnam ("the Auschwitz of the young generation"),[38] many, including Haffner's daughter Sarah,[39] directed their anger at his former employer, Axel Springer.

[37] The Morgenpost responded to a protest blockade of its presses by itself proposing parallels to Kristallnacht: "back then the Jews were robbed of their property; today it is the Springer concern that is threatened".

[42] Haffner's contribution to this pushing of "differences to the top" ("Zuspitzung")[3] was not appreciated by Brandt's Social Democrats or by Stern,[19] and especially not after Meinhof took what she regarded as a next logical step in a struggle with "fascism".

Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.”[43] On 19 May 1972, the Red Army Faction (the "Baader Meinhof Gang") bombed Springer's Hamburg headquarters injuring 17 people.

[44] Like the novelists Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, Haffner did not resist the temptation, in placing Meinhof's deeds in perspective, of a further swipe at Bild;[45] "no one", he argued, had done more to plant "the seeds of violence" than Springer journalism.

[49] In October 1975, the editorial board of Stern refused a submission from Haffner on the grounds that it violated the magazine's commitment to a "democratic constitutional order and to progressive-liberal principles".

After his father's death he collated the memoir started early in 1939 but abandoned for the more urgent propaganda value of Germany: Jekyll & Hyde, and arranged for its publication as Geschichte eines Deutschen/Defying Hitler (direct translation of the title: History of a German).