It is August 1933 and it has been seven months since Hitler was appointed as the Chancellor of Germany, and the country is almost completely Nazified. The most famous radio personality Friedrich Foxx is part of Germany's transformation as the voice of its rebrth, and soon he must choose whether he is going to support the madness that is Naziism and it;s facist dictatorship or whether he is going to fight against it.

The hero of this cautionary tale, Friedrich Foxx, is a journalist whose story we begin to follow in the 1930's.
A suave character, he loves Hitler, but does not as yet take seriously how deep his - and others' - anti-semitism really is. Then his secretary starts to refer to one of his friends as a hook-nose.

He begins to see the light a little more when his good friend Goebbels sends him an obnoxious bureaucrat who asks him to toe the line a little more with this anti-semitism. But surely his good buddy will recognise that a gentleman journalist needs full autonomy to express himself as he pleases?

Won't he?.........

Fast forward a few years. Foxx is now an old, broken man, having not just lost his illustrious job, but incarcerated too. He is poor, disenfranchised, trying to survive in a destroyed Berlin. But the Nazis left behind still want to wreak maximum destruction.

Foxx meets two boys, and seeks redemption in trying to protect and shelter them. However, this is not a story that believes in happy endings.

Possibly the sad ending is meant to drive home the cautionary message, though to me it brought an element of distaste. The degradation of humanity, the capacity for committing atrocities and breaking the human spirit - yes, there are surely real-life tales from WW2 that are surely far more heinous than this. We get the point.

It's a short story, barely a novella. And its message is no less true. Complacency and not recognising evil in time allow these things to happen so no, don't be like Foxx.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are my own.

The Fox had me captivated from beginning to end. Also, no one in this story was likable. Their personality changes throughout the war were realistically haunting. Johann and his brother will haunt my dreams tonight . Very, very well written and haunting.

The Fox by Adam S. Toporek is about Friedrich Foxx who as a Nazi party member helped them come to power in 1933 but slowly wakes up to the realisation of just what he has done and the monster he has helped to unleash on the world. This was a short read but I enjoyed it immensely.

It is a wel written book, but there is s0 much in between the lines and the story it self that is missing that could have added so much to it. like what he Said on the radio what landed him in prison and what happened to him during his time in jail and between that and the end of the Storry

I'll be a good while ridding my mind of the images from the last pages of Adam Toporek’s “The Fox,” in which a deranged Hitler supporter, holed up in the rubble of a building in Berlin in the Reich's final days, with Russian shells exploding all around her and a roving German unit having left the corpses of two children outside, one hanging from a lamppost with a sign reading “I betrayed the Fatherland” and the other with a smashed-in face and a sign reading “I listen to Americans,” with all that, she’s still enamored enough of the Reich to initiate an insane procreative attempt with a fellow survivor with the hope of implanting within herself the seeds of a new Germany. Totally deranged she is, as I say, with her mad vision of raising from the ashes a new Germany, though it's hardly just the stuff of fiction, her wild delusion, with how apparently some Germans still today believe Hitler was overall good for their country and would like to see his return, and even in our own supposedly more enlightened country, the very real Jan. 6 protest sought to reinstall a leader unable to bring himself to condemn the Nazi sympathizers at Charlottesville and taken enough with totalitarianism that he has kind words for the likes of Putin and intimates God knows what with his talk of retribution if he’s re-elected. All of which is not to suggest that we’re at all near being like Nazi Germany, but closer, anyway, than I would have ever thought possible growing up as I did unabashedly celebratory of the ideals of America as I understood them. And to the extent that Toporek’s novel, with its apocalyptic picture of the last days of the Reich, is sounding any sort of cautionary warning to our own country, I’d give it a 10 if I could and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone concerned about the current state of our imperiled democracy. Read it and take heed, America.

This little novella packs a punch -- its a vignette into the life of one man in Germany, both in 1933 and 1945. I liked how it wasn't overcomplicated in terms of characters or plot, but showed what real events could have been like for this type of person. Even though it is short, you get invested in Friedrich and his moral struggle as the Third Reich is on the rise, and even in the end of the war. Highly recommend for anyone interested in WWII literature!

An amazing short story about a man who helped create the Nazi terror, then woke up to what he created. This story is fantastic, but too short! It needed to be a lot longer with the parts between 1933 and 1945 in it. And I thought the ending, while admittedly realistic was sad. I have to admit, I like happy endings.