Of Good and Evil

Of Good and Evil: Prelude to the Holocaust, a historical fiction, creates an intimate portrait of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, beginning with his failed 1923 attempt to overthrow the Democratic Weimar Republic, and ending in 1939 with the start of World War II in Europe. The narratives' main fictional characters are SS Lieutenant Colonel Claus Mayer, who will do anything to advance Adolf Hitler's dream of a Jew-free Europe, and Jewess Rachel Goldstein, who will do anything to prevent that from happening. In 1923, after Mayer attempts suicide to escape starvation, a leading SA Storm Trooper, offers him a choice. Reject his moral values and survive as a trooper, or return to the streets of Germany as a starving homeless man. Mayer joins the SA, purges his ethical constraints, replacing compassion with cold-hearted indifference, then rises to become a prominent Nazi. During Hitler's attempted coup, Mayer invades Rachel's home and orders her family to leave Germany or be killed. Convinced that Germany would soon become an anti-Semitic Dictatorship she becomes an MI6 British secret agent and establishes herself as an esteemed Hitler devotee in Germany. In 1938, Rachel meets Mayer. She still despises him. Unable to remember their last meeting, he falls in love with her. Sensing an opportunity to enhance her MI6 contacts, and retaliate for his raid on her home, she initiates a fake romance. In 1939, Rachel learns that the Gestapo captured a key MI6 colleague. A master in the art of torture will interrogate him. If he divulges his secrets, the Nazis would obliterate MI6s German and Austrian resistance networks. She must rescue him, but can't do it without Mayer's help. Can she convince him to become her ally in MI6s battle against Adolf Hitler?