[3] Despite his conversion to Protestantism in 1912 and his strong identification with German culture, Klemperer's life started to worsen considerably after the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933.

In 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed removing all non-Aryan professors from their profession, with the exception of those who had fought in World War I.

Eventually the Klemperers were forced to put down their household cat, a tomcat named Muschel, because of a restriction as to Jews' ownership of pets.

During the pogrom later in November 1938 their house was searched by Nazis who found Klemperer's saber from World War I—he was arrested briefly and released.

Here, and especially when he ventured out, or at factories where he was forced to work, he was routinely questioned, mistreated, and humiliated by the Gestapo, Hitler Youth members and Dresden citizens.

[6] On 13 February 1945, Klemperer witnessed the delivery of notices of deportation to some of the last remaining members of the Jewish community in Dresden, and feared that the authorities would soon also send him to his death.

On the following three nights the Allies heavily bombed Dresden for the first time, causing massive damage and a firestorm; during the chaos that followed, Klemperer removed his yellow star (punishable by death if discovered) on 19 February, joined a refugee column, and escaped into American-controlled territory.

He and his wife survived, and Klemperer's diary narrates their return, largely on foot through Bavaria and Eastern Germany, to their house in Dölzschen, on the outskirts of Dresden.

His former friend, historian Johannes Kühn [de], who had severed connections with Klemperer upon his dismissal from the University of Dresden, welcomed him back as if nothing had happened.

[citation needed] The Nazi Government could not effectively force people to divorce, so many intermarried Jewish and non-Jewish Germans stayed married, despite scrutiny by others.

[citation needed] In the diary, the much-feared Gestapo is seen carrying out daily, humiliating, and brutal house searches, delivering beatings, hurling insults, and robbing inhabitants of coveted foodstuffs and other household items.

[citation needed] This diary details the Nazis' perversion of the German language for propaganda purposes in entries that Klemperer used as the basis for his book '[LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii.

In 2000, Herbert Gantschacher wrote, together with Katharina and Jürgen Rostock, the documentary play Chronicle 1933–1945 using original documents from the biographies of Robert Ley and Victor Klemperer.

The first performance took place in 2000 in the documentation centre at the planned "Strength Through Joy" beach resort Prora on the island of Rügen in Germany.