Cassell Military Classics: Officer Factory

This timeless novel is part character sketch, part comedy, and part morality tale. Set in early 1944 at a training academy for Wehrmacht officers, the story features a group of unforgettable personalities, all finding their way through the moral fog of war. Cynics, idealists, and those just trying to survive, clash following the murder of a strong-willed junior officer. Kirst draws a painfully humanizing sketch of Germany during the National Socialist era, with sometimes hilarious glimpses of a tragic society en route to "final victory." Written two decades after WWII, the themes are still lamentably relevant in the 21st Century.

Hans Kirst's officers and officer candidates are chillingly ordinary guys at an officers' training school near the end of World War II. The training officers go through the motions of readying potential officers as fodder for the war effort. The training officers are quite a mix: some have enormous but fragile egos, wife and girlfriend problems, or are in denial about their distate for women but admiration for young men, flout the rules of command, or show great compassion. The young cadets are jokers, followers, outsiders; some are for the Fuehrer, others are wholly indifferent, and others actually dislike Hitler. The constant jockeying for position has its fatal attractions; when a training officer is killed during an exercise, another young officer, Lieutenant Kraft, is given the thankless task of determining whether it was an accident or murder. His path of discovery and the decisions he makes expose the silence and complicity of even the "good" German officers in the horrific policies of the Fuehrer.

A very clever look in the moral and ethical void of the Third Reich while following the stained tragic figure of Lt Kraft. Kraft is given the task of finding the truth behind an accidental explosion at the officer school which claims the life of an experienced officer. A delicious tale of intrigue and suspense follow until, like a runaway train, the book comes to its inevitable, tear wrenching conclusion.