
The Strongest Weapon by Notburga Tilt was published in 1972, by a small firm of publishers in Devon. Possibly it was a book which the writer paid to have published as I honestly can’t see any publisher stumping up money to the author.
Notburga Tilt was an Austrian who lived there at the time of Hitler’s Third Reich and this book is supposedly about the author’s experiences as a member of the Austrian resistance. It was apparently her job to get information from German soldiers – using her wonderful beauty and sex appeal to vamp them.
In fact in every chapter the author harps on about her good looks and she is constantly being proposed marriage by German officers whom she has only just met! One of them she actually did marry – AND he was in the SS.
The book isn’t at all well written but I feel I can’t be too picky about that as she obviously wasn’t writing in her first language. However I believe that one of the most important things about being in any resistance group is to keep quiet about it. One of the first things Burgi told some of the German soldiers who were swooning over her was that she was in the resistance!! – with no consequences.
There’s also precious little about what she was actually doing apart from seducing Nazis and travelling about. She does however mention losing her watch and a few sentences later she’s checking her watch! However, after searching the internet I was surprised to see that she actually appeared on TV’s This is Your Life and seems to have been a bit of a celebrity at one point, locally anyway.
I struggled to the end, just because I was so incredulous really. It reminded me of when my oldest brother first moved to Holland in the early 1970s. He said that everybody of a certain age claimed to be in the Dutch resistance. In reality though people had to be so brave to do such work that they must have been very much in the minority. However I can imagine that post-war some people did feel the need to dream up an alternative history for themselves. The author of this book seems to have been one of them, but it was the narcissistic aspect of her personality that I found most embarrassing, especially as the photo of her at the front of the book is of a woman who is as plain as a scone – as we say in Scotland.
How did you come across this book? Interesting that she appeared on This is Your Life. I remember watching that as a kid. Which shows my age, but that’s OK. Very interesting post, Katrina.
tracybham,
I found it in a charity shop, I believe it was in Evesham when we were in England for a football match a few months ago. I knew a few elderly women who really had a very interesting war, but they never spoke about it and I only found out about their escapades after their death. I think that’s normally what happens, people who trumpet about things are rarely genuine in my experience. I also remember This is Your Life – and the times they seemed to be scraping the barrel!
Notburga Tilt was a warm, caring, kind person. She does not deserve the unpleasant comments posted about her on this site. She was genuine and had a lovely family. Perhaps these critics should get their facts right. Cynth
C Youson,
I’m sure she was as you say but have you read her book? It is full of holes and inconsistencies which an editor should have picked up on. It’s a nonsense which any careful reader would realise.