The Kindly Ones: Jonathan Little

This is a fascinating and disturbing read, nearly 1,000 pages describing in detail the life of an SS officer, Max Aue, who experiences some of the worst of the German atrocities in the Second World War. Written as an autobiography, Aue is living as an old man in France, reflecting on his experiences. In 1941 he is attached to the Einsatzgruppen, so we have vividly described scenes of the killing of, among others, the Jews, including at Babi Yar in Kiev. The author, Jonathan Little, has a way of bringing to life the barbarity and the ordinariness of the barbarity, including the detailed statistics gathered by the German forces. The book moves on to the limits of the German advance to the Caucasus, where our ‘hero’ is tasked with helping understand something of the various ethnic groups living in the area. After spending time with the German 6th Army cut off in Stalingrad Auer returns to Berlin, then to Auschwitz where the slaughter of the unwanted has reached industrial proportions, and finally to the Battle for Berlin, where Aue is fighting for his own life.

The protagonist is a learned man, a doctor of law, caught up in very difficult times. The author said that he tried to imagine how he would behave if he was living as a young adult in Nazi Germany. In this it is an honest account, and should be read by anyone who claims that they would refuse to be involved. We know from the works of Stanley Milgram and others in the 1960s that so-called ordinary people do what are normally conceived of as despicable things when the culture they live in requires them to do so. This is one of the great things about the book, that it shows ordinary people, including intellectuals, doing extraordinary things, living perfectly normal lives, studying others, writing articles, discussing the nuances of Caucasian languages, and killing people.

For me there is too much on Aue’s unusual sexuality and too many descriptions of diarrhoea. On the other hand, these elements and others, including his vivid dreams, do demonstrate the depth of characterisation of Aue. While aspects of his sexuality before the war is described, the descriptions of shit and dreams may be seen as Aue’s trauma, the responses of an already disturbed individual becoming ever more disturbed by his experiences. Against this, Aue describes the world in a mechanical and non-emotional manner. This is exemplified through the style. There are few paragraphs, and conversations are held entirely within paragraphs, so the reader sometimes has to concentrate to know who is speaking. This also adds to the relentlessness of the book.

I do finish many books and they disappear quickly from my mind, but this one leaves a lingering sense of the horror of war, particularly the atrocities of the Second World War and how I might have acted in those times. I have now read it twice. It made me feel that I experienced something of what the book describes, and for that reason alone the book is worthwhile.

The author is French, where the book was a bestseller, winning the Prix Goncourt. He spent 18 months conducting research, including visiting the main sites where the action of the book took place. He incorporates many historical characters, from Himmler through to the lower level leaders of the Einsatzgruppen and other organisations. The intertwining of history and fiction works well.

The translator does a good job of transmitting the sense of Aue’s personality. As I have not read the original I cannot know, but there is a congruence between the Aue we get to know and the writing style.

The book should become a classic, and a must read for anyone interested in understanding the Holocaust. We usually get the Jewish version of the Holocaust, but it is important to try and balance this by getting the perpetrators outlook. They were, after all, human too. While The Kindly Ones is fiction, it still provides us with some historical understanding of the German perspective.