ROBERT HUDDLESTON Libri

On April 3-4, 1945, the city of Nordhausen, Germany, was attacked by Allied bombers. "Why us?" declared the city's mayor as he surveyed his destroyed city and upwards of eight thousand dead civilians. "We have no military targets." In truth, SS General Hans Kammler, the Nazi in charge of a massive underground rocket factory, was using Nordhausen barracks to dump dead and dying slave laborers. But by the time of the Allied bombing, Kammler-the architect of Auschwitz and director of Hitler's V-2 rocket program-had disappeared. On April 2, the general had rounded up his rocket experts and packed them in a special train, determined to negotiate a deal with the American military: live German rocket experts for a ticket to a safe haven. What ultimately happened to this ambitious high-ranking Nazi and evil innovator of mass deaths? The fate of this major war criminal-known by his prisoners as Satan's Henchman-is the mystery and crux of this historical novella.

This is a book of fiction, a war novel that required considerable research into the two World Wars. Having been born three years before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the author's teenage years focused on the Great War and combat duty in the Second World War led to a lifetime of learning and writing of the two epics of the 20th century. To those who question the value of fiction over nonfiction, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver offered this: ""I love fiction that educates me on the sly about something I did not realize I wanted to know. As long as novelists have done their research and honored accuracy where it counts, I'd rather learn from a confabulation than a textbook. This story, therefore, honors the historical facts while introducing fictional characters in love and war. Also present in the story are commentaries of issues often distorted by propaganda.