THE KNIGHT, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL
Ella Leffland
New York, William Morrow and Company, 1990
719 pp., $22.95
In his final days Adolf Hitler, incredibly, believed that he had not been sufficiently ruthless in carrying out his vision of a renewed and purified Europe. One of his last recorded remarks, made three days before his suicide in his Berlin bunker, was "Afterward, you rue the fact that you've been so kind."
Most of us need to believe that Hitler was insane and that the Nazi horror was the work of one evil madman, a leader so powerful that the others, mere followers, fell under his sway. But how, then do we explain people like Hermann Göring? Nicknamed "Hitler's fist," he was one of the principal architects of the Nazi police state, head of the storm troopers, founder of the Gestapo, creator of the concentration camps, commander of the Luftwaffe, and the primary spokesman and ambassador for the Nazi party. He also was a devoted husband, a charming and urbane statesman, a beloved World War I aviation hero, and a deep patriot. He was intelligent, forceful, and self-directed - no mere follower hypnotized by the power of the fuhrer.
Nor was he a madman. For Göring, as well as other highly ranked Nazi leaders who were clearly sane and yet went along with Hitler's demented policies, we must discover some other category, some larger set of circumstances that enabled these men to take part, zealously, in a program so horrible that only forty-five years later - still within the life spans of many of those who witnessed it - we find it difficult to believe it really happened.
During those dark days in Europe, Ella Leffland was a teenager in California. She lived in fear of bombs; and because Göring was a head of the Luftwaffe, it was he, not Hitler, who personified the Nazi terror in her mind. After writing several highly praised, partially autobiographical novels (Mrs. Munck, Love Out of Season, Rumors of Peace), Leffland decided she had to write a different kind of book, a novel about Germany and the war, and the Göring would be her point of access to the faraway events that had clouded her girlhood.
That was in 1979. Leffland studied German at night school, listened to tapes of speeches by Nazi leaders, read exhaustively, and traveled several times to Germany, where she interviewed family members and former Nazis who had worked with Göring. The result, more than ten years later, is The Knight, Death, and the Devil, an impressive blend of scholarship and imagination that succeeds admirably in re-creating the dark drama of the twenties, thirties, and forties in Germany, and in bringing to life one of the most notorious players in that drama.
The novel opens with a reassuringly simple portrait of its main character. Göring, shown in his barren Nuremberg jail cell, is clever, arrogant, cynical, and unrepentant. The young U.S. army psychiatrist who interviews him listens as he boasts of his World War I flying exploits, describes his war wounds with narcissistic relish, and speaks with contempt of any sign of weakness on the part of his fellow prisoners and with continued loyalty to the now-dead
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