Hitler's Peace

Great WW2 alt. hist. book. Deals with the Yalta Conference and that neat Hitler/Stalin/FDR espionage stuff. Fast paced and good characters. Evocative of the time. Really like this author, he writes well and does his homework.

"Hitler's Peace" revolves around what might really have transpired at the Teheran "Big Three" conference of 1943 among Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Much of what took place is still unknown, and there are tantalizing suggestions of plotting and intrigue in the actual historical record. Germany was seeking a separate peace with one or another of its enemies. Each meanwhile worried about Germany's successfully doing so with someone else. And top Nazis clashed with each other over whether to make peace, as they also jockeyed for present or postwar position. Hovering over all of this is emerging knowledge about atrocities including the Holocaust, the Katyn massacre in Poland and Soviet treatment of German POWs after Stalingrad. This makes great fictional fodder, and Philip Kerr delivers with a maelstrom of intrigue. Kerr, author of the very fine "Berlin Noir" trilogy of detective stories set in Nazi and postwar Germany, centers the action here on Willard Mayer, an American professor now with the OSS and detailed first to do some research on Katyn for Roosevelt, and later to accompany him to the conference. Mayer discovers their entourage has been penetrated by a German agent. Mayer has a politically checkered past. Descended from German society on one side, he moves easily into high Nazi circles and works with the German Abwehr in the late 1930s, but only after his philosophical leanings have already brought him into Communist circles in the early 1930s in Vienna, leading him to the Soviet NKVD. And then he chucks it all in short order to move back to the States and, within a few years, get spotted by the OSS. Is that all clear? It seems unlikely that an American would so effortlessly rise up into a sensitive Nazi position. And in the real world, the NKVD, having enlisted him, would never let him quit so blithely; Stalin's spies would have hunted him down. And the OSS, meanwhile, sends him to the Oval Office with no idea of any of this? Kerr, with his detective story background, writes Mayer in a first-person private-eye mold, sometimes Philip Marlowe, sometimes Nick and Nora Charles, all wisecracks and martinis. But he's not consistent with it. Meanwhile much of the story is related through other characters' eyes, without the "lishen-shweetheart" style at all, and it's jarring to go back and forth. Nor does it seem to go with the more fateful World War II subject matter. Kerr casts Mayer variously as an elbow-patched philosophy professor, the author of a musty and difficult book; as a swinging sophisticate, as a jilted lover, as a conscience-driven man of action, as an intelligence agent who successfully turns the Abwehr-NKVD-OSS trifecta, none of them the wiser. There are too many ingredients in this cocktail and Kerr never really gets them all to blend. He's better in his personalization of American leaders like Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. And best of all is his treatment of Axis bigwigs like Schellenberg, Canaris, Hitler, von Ribben

As someone who knows a fair amount of history, Hitler's Peace is just an excellent read. Whatever various negative reviewers here have nitpicked, this is a truly orginal spin on one of WWII pivotal moments. To me, the best aspect of this book was how it took historical figures - FDR, Himmler, Churchill and turned them into real people. I've just ordered Kerr's early Berlin Noir books, and am looking forward to them.

I suspect I am not alone in being frustrated at the number of so-so books Philip Kerr has done since his early days with Berlin Noir and A Philosophical Investigation. If you found The Grid, Esau, A Five Year Plan, or The Second Angel to be sub-par, you owe Philip Kerr one more chance. It's not fair to say too much about what transpires in Hitler's Peace without ruining the story. Suffice to say that he has captured the "you are here" feeling he had in Berlin Noir not only with the Nazi's again, but also with the Americans, and to a lesser degree with the Russians. And he has a very clever idea at the heart of the book. As usual, the history of ideas, and particularly the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (not attributed here as it was in A Philosophical Investigation) abound throughout the plot. Although the historical characters are reasonably well detailed and realistic, some of the ones created by Kerr are a bit thin. There are a few subplots which don't seem to have much bearing on the story and don't seem to resolve themselves. However, this book is quite worthwhile for 1) The main plot idea; 2) The realism of characters you have read about in history but don't really 'know'; and 3) The way Kerr weaves philosophy into the plot without over doing it. Welcome back, Mr. Kerr, to a literary genre in which you do very well. Please leave the pot-boilers to Michael Crichton.

In 1943, the leaders of the Third Reich conclude that they cannot win the war against the allied forces. Hitler wants to negotiate a peace different from the first World War in which Germany is left with dignity; Roosevelt demands unconditional surrender. Various plans offered by the Germans to the American fail to convince the President that the Russians will turn against the allies when the Communists feel the time is right. Philosopher Willard Meyer works for OSS as a German analyst when Roosevelt selects him to scrutinize the Third Reich allegations against the Russians. Once a diehard communist who spied for the Russians against the Germans, Willard is now a super American patriot, who plans to learn the truth about reported German-Russian atrocities. Meanwhile German patriotic General Schellenberg plans to kill The Allies leaders in order to save the hinterland from further destruction in a losing cause. Philip Kerr returns to World War II Germany, the setting where his stupendous Berlin Noir trilogy took place, with an exciting heart pumping alternate history based on allied and axis leaders making different decisions at key moments. Interestingly General Schellenberg and Willard Meyer share a similar zealousness for their respective country, willing to kill or die if necessary for their homeland. There is plenty of action in this exciting thriller, but the characters, real and fictional, drive the plot into a believable what if scenario told by altering perspectives. Harriet Klausner