I Was Adolf Hitler's Jewish Neighbour

Adolf Hitler's former Jewish neighbour has co-authored a book about his childhood living next door to the Nazi leader.

Edgar Feuchtwanger, 88, was five years old when Hitler moved into the building across the street from his family home in Munich.

The building was Prinzregentenplatz 16, Hitler's main residence from 1929 to 1933, when the Nazi leader was elected Chancellor and moved to Berlin.

For years Feuchtwanger walked in front of Hitler's house every day to go back and forth to school, unaware that his neigbour's rabid anti-semitism would soon almost tear his family apart.

"It all sounds so cosy when I talk about how I lived in the same road as Hitler, like it was not a big deal," Feuchtwanger once told the BBC. "But it's so difficult to think that people you saw almost on a daily basis were responsible for turning the world upside down."

Prinzregentenplatz 16 remained the Fuhrer's Munich residence until his death in 1945. Today it is a police station with no indication of its infamous former occupier.

"Hitler would come to Munich at weekends. You could tell he was at home because of the cars parked outside," Feuchtwanger said, remembering the time when he once looked the Fuhrer in the eyes while crossing the street with his nanny.

"He looked straight at me, I don't think he smiled."

The day after the 1938 night of broken glass, which signalled the beginning of a wave of more violent repression against the Jews by the Nazi regime, the Gestapo arrested Feuchtwanger's father and took him to Dachau labour camp.

Fortunately for Feuchtwanger and his family, his father was released after six weeks and the family decided to flee Germany for the UK, where they arrived in early 1939.

Now living in Aveyron, France, Feuchtwanger wrote his memories with the help of French journalist Bertil Scali.

The 320-page book is titled Hitler, Mon Voisin, Souvenirs D'un Enfant Juif (My Neighbor Hitler: Memories of a Jewish Child) and is due to be published on January 10.