Not for the faint-hearted

‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed a false identity in order to escape ‘the rope or Siberia’. As Berlin falls to the Red Army he slips out of the city and makes his way to Paris disguised as a returning French STO, an enlisted worker.

But the war has reduced him to ‘an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and a great shame’. And so he decides to write his memoirs. What follows is a blow-by-blow account of a descent into hell, perhaps the least metaphorical hell invented by man: 1941, the Eastern Front, the Ukraine, Stalingrad, Auschwitz and the fall of Berlin.