The Kindly Ones

Years after the war, Maximilien Aue lives as a respectable factory owner in France, and from that disguise he narrates his service as an SS officer. Cultured and steeped in philosophy and music, he is also a participant in mass murder, and Littell walks him through the Einsatzgruppen killings in Ukraine, the catastrophe of Stalingrad, the camps, and the final collapse of the regime in Berlin. The book uses Aue's cold intelligence to lay bare the bureaucracy and logic of total war and genocide, holding the whole machine in view at once, and refusing the reassurance of a narrator the reader can safely place outside humanity.