Read our sample translation of We Don’t Want Adventurers Here

About the book

Ernst August Kaerger (1879-1955) had, like his forebears, been destined to become a baker in a sleepy provincial town in Prussia. However, during a period of upheaval in early twentieth-century Germany, there were other professions in store for him: he became a naval doctor in colonial Namibia and China, he performed surgery on hundreds of young men on the Flemish battlefields during the First World War, he bandaged the Red Baron’s fingers, was present when SS officer Reinhard Heydrich met his wife, he crossed paths with both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler, and, during World War II, he managed to save his own sons from the horrors of the Eastern Front.

In We Don’t Want Adventurers Here, Elco Lenstra uses diaries, vast quantities of archival material and hundreds of letters to evocatively reconstruct the fascinating life of his great-grandfather. The latter had been a first-hand witness to countless highs in lows of modern European history.