EDMUND Bush belongs to a small group. He is almost certainly its only member.

Can anyone else in Winchester, in Hampshire, or even the UK claim to have shouted the greeting ‘Heil Goering!’ as Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s train trundled through the Austrian countryside in 1938?

Goering, you may recall, was the man who oversaw Nazi attempts to destroy the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940.

The special train was light blue, to match the colour of Goering’s specially-made uniform, remembers Edmund, now 91.

He has a highly unusual bi-national background which gives him an unusual insight into how Europe can and should develop, highly topical with the EU referendum coming up on June 23.

Edmund has written a book Let’s Mention the War that is part vivid autobiography of his childhood in pre-Nazi Austria and early adulthood in the UK, combined with a polemic and call for an end to what he sees as the twin problems of religion and nationalism.

A child of two nations and cultures, he gives a rare insight into the Nazi period that led to the horror of the Holocaust against the Jews.

Edmund is a living witness to the descent of much of Europe into the madness that led to the Second World War.

And he admits that as a boy he was seduced by the glamour of the Nazis with their uniforms, flags, marching bands and Hitler Youth, to which his friends were members.

His current home in Sparsholt near Winchester is a far cry from the Berlin where he was born in 1924, the son of a German mother and a half-British, half-German and London-born father, who had served in the Kaiser’s army in the First World War.

When he was six his family moved to the small town of Moedling in Austria. For seven years he lived an idyllic, care-free life before the family moved to England when he was 13, shortly after the Nazis took over the country – the Anschluss. The office of the American firm that employed his father was closed.

Although the family was registered British, only his father could speak English and even today Edmund speaks his fluent English with a slight German accent.

Edmund went to school in England and in the 1939-45 war he worked in an armaments factory and joined the Home Guard. Afterwards he made a career in engineering and owned Air Wheel Ltd in Holton Heath, Dorset, before selling it to a German firm in 1997.

Looking back over nearly 80 years, it is his first-hand experience of Nazism that is fascinating. A chapter of his book is titled 'Scenes from Childhood: How I became a Nazi'.

He said: “My parents weren’t political, they had friends who were Nazis and others who weren’t. Throughout the period we had contacts with a Nazi element, but it was very low-key. At that time being a Nazi didn’t mean you wanted to murder Jews. But it is fair to say that Austria was anti-Semitic and so was a lot of Europe.”

The Anschluss saw the start of bullying of Jewish boys at Edmund’s school. He writes in the book: “I have been sharing my desk with Weiss, who is Jewish, for two years now. We have been quite friendly. But I don’t say anything to the bully who has been doing most of the pushing, because I’m afraid of him.”

When they heard Goering’s train was to go past, he and his friends would gather near the tracks: “We all shout ‘Heil Goering’ and laugh when we see the train.”

Another time he saw his friends Herbert and Walter marching with the Hitler Youth under a Swastika flag. Edmund could not join because he is British but feels and shares their pride.

“In a way I wish I were marching with them. It must be good to belong.”

Shortly before he left Moedling, at the station he met the wife of the local Jewish doctor beside herself with worry. Almost in a trance, she repeated: “What can we do, what can we do?”

Edmund said: “Don’t worry, Frau Doctor, it’ll be alright. Everything will be better.” For six million Jews, it wasn’t.

He now says: “We are all victims of history, our own birth, our own upbringing, but we have to drag ourselves out of that and take the broader view.”

The flirtation with Nazism did not survive the departure from Germany, the war and the revelation of the industrial slaughter of the Holocaust.

Britain’s claim to moral superiority over Germany is on thin ice. His book points out the RAF bombed the undefended city of Dresden in February 1945, the firestorm killing tens of thousands of mainly civilians. A lesser evil than the Holocaust but still evil, he says.

How to break the power of history and how it feeds into nationalism today is the theme of the second half of the book. As the American writer James Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Edmund is conscious of the power of history but how it can be misused. The only way to tackle the root causes of political violence is for a new way of thinking and belief in reason rather than the emotions of belonging, which lead to nationalism and worse.

“In 100 years time, by that time either we will have come together as members of the human family, rather than nations, and if we haven’t it may well be we are living in a post-nuclear world,” he said.

Edmund, a member of the British Humanist Association, promotes social ethics that would see the end of religious teaching in schools in favour of teaching the importance of the belonging to the human family.

In that way the importance of national boundaries and the “shackles of prejudice” will diminish.

l Let’s Mention the War is published by Grosvenor House Publishing Limited, priced £8.99 and available on Amazon or on order from bookshops.