The Kindly Ones
“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”
Dr. Max Aue, the man at the heart of Jonathan Littell’s stunning and controversial novel The Kindly Ones, personifies the evils of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Highly educated and cultured, he was an ambitious SS officer, a Nazi and mass murderer who was in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. He tells us of his experience during the war. He was present at Auschwitz and Babi Yar, witnessed the battle of Stalingrad, and survived the fall of Berlin — receiving a medal from Hitler personally in the last days of Nazi Germany.
Long after the war, he is living a comfortable bourgeois life in France,…
Jonathan Littell was born in New York to American parents, and grew up in the United States and France. He lives in Spain.
