Die Wohlgesinnten

The 'well-meaning ones' were celebrated by critics as a new war and peace: the fictional memoirs of the ss Obersturmführer Maximilian Aue, born in 1913, son of a German father and a French mother, doctor of law, early member of the NSDAP, joined the ss to escape prosecution under paragraph 175, but incestuously joined his twin sister for life. They are the disturbing memories of the scenes of the Second World War and the horror of the persecution and extermination of the Jews from June 1941 to April 1945, of the task forces and mass executions in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, of Babi Jar, the cauldron of Stalingrad, Auschwitz and Krakow, of Mittelbau Dora, occupied Paris or war-torn Berlin. They are the oppressive memories of all the encounters with the Nazi greats, of Himmler, in whose personal staff Aue is taken up in 1943, of dinners with Eichmann, of Heydrich, Höss or Speer. It is a frighteningly detailed novel about Nazi crimes, consistently told from the perspective of a perpetrator who saved himself into the safe existence of a factory director in France after the Second World War: "It is one of the most impressive books ever written about Nazism.