The Kindly Ones

Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, looks back on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, and the death camps as Nazi Germany falls. Set during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and in Berlin, The Kindly Ones is narrated by Dr Max Aue, who is both a cultivated intellectual and a participant in Nazi atrocities. From Stalingrad to the death camps and the nightmarish fall of Berlin, The Kindly Ones places Max Aue among figures including Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer and Hitler. As the Third Reich falls, Max reflects on the career that took him through mass murder and bureaucratic power, insisting on his own version of events.

Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, looks back on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, and the death camps as Nazi Germany falls. Set during the Second World War on the Eastern Front and in Berlin, The Kindly Ones is narrated by Dr Max Aue, who is both a cultivated intellectual and a participant in Nazi atrocities. From Stalingrad to the death camps and the nightmarish fall of Berlin, The Kindly Ones places Max Aue among figures including Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer and Hitler. As the Third Reich falls, Max reflects on the career that took him through mass murder and bureaucratic power, insisting on his own version of events.

“Simply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” — Time A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been called “a brilliant Holocaust novel. . . a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force,” (Michael Korda, The Daily Beast ). Destined to join the pantheon of classic epics of war such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate , The Kindly Ones offers a profound and gripping experience of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.

“Simply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” — Time A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been called “a brilliant Holocaust novel. . . a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force,” (Michael Korda, The Daily Beast ). Destined to join the pantheon of classic epics of war such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate , The Kindly Ones offers a profound and gripping experience of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max's story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.