In this powerful fictional memoir, a former Nazi official, now reinvented as a middle-class family man in northern France, tells the story of his life and times, promising that the story he has to tell is one that will implicate the reader as well as the teller.

Maximilien Aue graduates with a law degree just after the Nazis come to power and begins a new life in the security branch of the SS. Through him we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust in vivid detail from the dark and disturbing point of view of the executioner rather than the victim. Max is posted to Poland and the Ukraine; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad and at Auschwitz; he visits occupied Paris and lives through the chaotic final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. His tale is an intense, morally challenging read that has been compared with Tolstoy's War and Peace.