The Kindly Ones
Jonathan Littell
 The book is a fictional autobiography, describing the life of Maximilien Aue, a former officer in the SS who, decades later, tells the story of a crucial part of his life when he was an active member of the forces of the Third Reich. In the book, Aue accepts responsibility for his actions in massacres of the Jews, but most of the time he feels more like an observer than a direct participant. Aue starts the war as a member of an Einsatzgruppe in Ukraine, during which he participates in the Babi Yar massacre. He is then sent to the Battle of Stalingrad, but survives. After a convalescence period in Berlin and a visit to France, he is designated for a managerial role for the concentration camps and visits both the Auschwitz and Belzec extermination camps. He is present during the Battle of Berlin, Nazi Germany's last stand. By the end of the story, he leaves Germany unscathed. Throughout the book Aue meets several famous Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Hitler. The book is divided into seven chapters, each named after a baroque dance, following the sequence of a Bach Suite. The narrative of each chapter is influenced by the rhythm of each dance. ;« Toccata »: In this introduction, we are introduced to the narrator and discover how he has ended up in France after the war. He is the director of a lace factory, has a wife, children, and grandchildren, though he has no real affection for his family and continues his homosexual encounters when he travels on business. He hints of an incestuous love, which we learn later was for his twin sister. He explains that he has decided to write about his experiences during the war for his own benefit and not as an attempt to justify himself, even though he insists that it took all kinds of men, good and bad, to make up the SS. He closes the introduction by saying, "I live, I do what is possible, it is the same for everyone, I am a man like the others, I am a man like you. Come along, I tell you, I am like you." ;« Allemande I & II »: Aue describes his life as a member of one of the Einsatzgruppen death squads in Ukraine, particularly in the Crimea and in the Caucasus. He describes in detail the open air massacres of Jews and Bolsheviks behind the front lines (one of the massacres described is the Babi Yar Massacre in Kiev, 1941). Although he seems to become increasingly indifferent to the atrocities he is witnessing, he begins to experience daily bouts of vomiting and suffers a mental breakdown. After taking sick leave, he returns to his unit to discover that a hostile superior officer has arranged that he be transferred to the front line at Stalingrad in 1942. ;« Courante » : Aue thus takes part in the last days of the battle of Stalingrad. As with the massacres, he is the soldier observer; the narrator rather than the combatant. In the midst of the chaos, violence, and starvation, he manages to have a discussion with a Russian political commissar POW about the similarities between the Nazi and the Bolshevik world views, and once again is able to indicate his intellectual support for Nazi ideas. He is seriously wounded in the head and is miraculously evacuated just before the German surrender in February 1943. ;« Sarabande »: Convalescing in Berlin, Aue is awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, by Heinrich Himmler himself, for his heroic action at Stalingrad. While still on sick leave, he decides to visit his mother and stepfather in Antibes, in Italian-occupied France. Apparently, while he is in a deep sleep, his mother and stepfather are brutally murdered. Max flees from the house without notifying anybody and returns to Berlin. ;« Menuet en rondeaux »: Aue is transferred to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, headed by Himmler, where he plays a managerial role for the concentration camps. He struggles to improve the living conditions of those prisoners selected to work in the factories as slave laborers, in order to improve their productivity. The reader meets top Nazi bureaucrats organizing the implentation of the Final Solution (i.e., Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höß, and Himmler) and is given a glimpse of extermination camps (i.e., Auschwitz and Belzec); he also spends some time in Budapest, just when preparations are being made for transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The reader witnesses the tug-of-war between those who are concerned with war production (Albert Speer) and those who are doggedly trying to implement the Final Solution. It is during this period that two SS police officers from the Kripo, who are investigating the murders of his mother and stepfather, begin to visit him regularly. Like the Furies, they hound and torment him with their questions, which indicate their suspicions about his role in the crime. ;« Air »: Max visits his sister and brother-in-law's empty house in Pomerania. There, he engages in a veritable autoerotic orgy particularly fueled by fantasy images of his twin sister. The two SS police officers follow his trail to the house, but he manages to hide from them. ;« Gigue »: Max travels back to Berlin through enemy Soviet lines with his friend Thomas, who has come to rescue him. Thomas is trying to impersonate a French laborer, knowing that his high SS rank is sure to get him killed if he is caught by Soviet forces. In Berlin, Max and Thomas find many of their colleagues preparing for escape in the chaos of the last days of the Third Reich. Aue meets and is decorated by Hitler in the Führerbunker. During the decoration ceremony, Aue inexplicably bites Hitler's nose, drawing blood and the wrath of Hitler's men, yet he manages to escape through the Berlin U-Bahn subway tunnels, only to encounter his police pursuers again. Though their case has been repeatedly thrown out of court, they're unwilling to accept defeat and prepare to execute him. Barely escaping their clutches when the Russians storm the tunnels and kill one of the policemen, Aue wanders aimlessly for a while in the streets of war-torn Berlin before deciding to make a break for it. Making his way through the heavily shelled Berlin Zoo, he's yet again faced by the surviving policeman. However, his friend Thomas kills the last policeman, only to himself be killed by Aue, who steals from him the papers and uniform of a French conscripted worker. We know from the beginning of the book that Aue's multilingualism will allow him to escape back to France with a new identity as a returning Frenchman. The fact that he has managed to survive so many close calls and to escape successfully leads him to end the book with the statement: "The Kindly Ones were on to me." But in the end, all is not explicitly laid out for the reader; for Littell, in the words of one reviewer, "excels in the unsaid."