An Immaculate Illusion

I really just wanted a book to keep me company over the next week because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out and about but I lost all track of time whilst reading this book and ended up binge reading. From the very beginning it draws you into the story and takes you on an unbelievable emotional rollercoaster ride.

The plot of the book is Hitler and WWII. Nothing new one would think. But it has so many unexpected twists and turns. Most of the characters are well enough known but they are brought to life in a way I haven’t before encountered. Incredibly believable mix of real and fictional. A suspenseful and engaging read, albeit uncomfortable at times.

Brilliantly researched and perfectly paced.

The ending definitely wasn’t what I expected but brought a welcome smile after so much tension.

Definitely worth a read.

When I was growing up in the years immediately following World War II, there was a story going round that Hitler hadn’t actually died in the underground bunker but had somehow escaped and made his way to Argentina or some such Nazi sanctuary. By the time I'd entered my teens, though, the story had been largely discredited, with the more officially agreed-upon version being that both he and his mistress, Eva Braun, had died by their own hands and their bodies burned beyond recognition by loyal underlings. And indeed that’s the version orchestrated for public consumption by Hitler’s henchmen even as the truth was something different in D.A. Panama’s “An Immaculate Illusion,” which pretty much comports with historical record except on a few counts, including, as I say, the details of the Fuhrer’s last moments and the depiction of Eva and her sister, Gretl.
Libidinous, in a word, the two women are presented as, with the SS’s Hermann Fegelein, a sexual partner of Eva’s, describing her as “randy” and "insatiable.” So sexually obsessed with him, indeed, is she that she sets things up for the similarly lascivious Gretl to marry him so he’ll be close enough that Eva can continue her assignations with him. “She's dreamy about you – I mean, big time!” Eva says in making the case for the marriage, sounding more like a contemporary teenager than a 1940s German woman, as she also does also when, in responding to Fegelein’s question of whether Hitler has ever seen her more carnal side, she responds, “you can’t be serious. … He only gets off on corpses and nut-jobs.”
Not the prim image, at any rate, that one might glean from news clips of her, the novel’s Eva, whose avaricious sexual appetite is depicted as not exactly unknown to Nazi higher-ups, with Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, advising her at one point, “Be discreet, my dear, and all will be well.”
All will be well, the reader is given to understand, because, in an instance perhaps of dramatic license, Hitler is depicted as being homosexual, with the chief object of his affections being the creator of the SS, Emil Maurice. And not just suggested, their relationship, but so blatantly expressed that at one point Maurice is fearful of their being interrupted but Hitler pooh-poohs the concern, saying with a half-giggle that everyone is away for the moment and, besides, their coupling shouldn’t take long, with Maurice realizing with a start that the object of Hitler’s mirth is “his rapidly rising tumescence.”
And while there’s apparently some historical basis for Hitler’s possibly being homosexual (it was the contention of Lothar Machtan’s “Hitler's Secret: The Double Life of a Dictator”), I couldn’t help wondering if Hitler would really have behaved so recklessly, just as, in another credibility issue for me with the novel, I couldn't help wondering if Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, would really have been so bold, in surveying the last-days wreckage of the Reich, to encourage Hitler to kill himself.
Credible or not, such moments with two of the Fuhrer’s closest intimates do make for vivid renditions of Hitler’s deteriorating state or even outright insanity. When, for instance, Hitler declares to Maurice that he must cease addressing him by his first name and henceforth address him as Fuhrer (this after a rant from Hitler about Jews and homosexuals), Maurice wonders, “What the hell had Adolf thought up now? Didn’t they have enough crack-pot ideas bubbling insanely on a dozen different rings?”
But it’s Speer who’s perhaps the better all-round register of Hitler’s deterioration, noting that at fifty-six years of age Hitler looked well past eighty, and a very sick eighty at that. Not, of course, that Hitler was ever the picture of the Aryan ideal, with his physical appearance in general and individual aspects that were far from appealing – the oft-noted flatulence, for instance, and his smell in general, as well as his “lack of intestinal restraint,” as it is put about him, that made for messy lavatories when he was done with them.
Still, however physically off-putting he might have been in close quarters, he was clearly at the top of his form in addressing crowds, and particularly their female members. “Girl Power had won the day,” Goebbels notes of his success at the polls, which had me recalling how for all that Trump opponents said before the 2016 election that women hadn’t spoken yet, that they would carry the day against him at the ballot box, I couldn’t help but notice that there was no scarcity of women at his rallies and obviously enough of them voted for him to propel him to victory.
A leap, perhaps, to try to make comparisons between Trump and Hitler, and, more generally, the U.S. and Nazi Germany, though perhaps not outrageously so, with how the recent PBS special on the American Bund documented America's flirtation with Nazism in the ‘30, and a contemporary historian, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an authority on authoritarianism, has not been shy about making Hitler comparisons.
However unlikely or not, though, the U.S. slipping into fascism and what its specific iteration might look like here, it's scenes like unrestrained Hitler devotees hanging dissenters from lampposts in the Reich’s final days that make Panama’s book and Adam Toporek's “The Fox” before it essential reading for Trump-adoring Americans, who can’t say they haven’t been warned.

546 pages

5 stars

Imagine a fair sized country in recovery from a recent war. A war that they had resoundingly lost. The citizenry is demoralized, defeated and very angry. The “peace” terms foisted upon them seem vastly unfair. People are unsettled, they are poor, they are suffering. The country’s economy is destroyed. Their government has let them down, betrayed them.

Along comes an individual. He is a charismatic orator. Yes, he is somewhat slovenly and looks to be an unlikely saviour. But what he says makes sense. He seems to have answers to their desperate situation. Maybe the population should listen to him.

Very slowly, the great orator increases his power. He finagles his way into the government. He creates situations that make it appear his policies are correct. He fools the citizens into believing he has all the answers. He begins to encroach on other countries' territories.

Somehow, unbelievably, the fair sized country finds itself at war again. How did this happen?

This book is the story of a group of mostly men, but some women, involved in the creation, actions and fall of the Third Reich. The key factor to learn is that the key players all hated one another. They were so focussed on self aggrandizement and acquisitiveness that they had little or no regard for the others in their cohort group. The backstabbing and treacherous actions occurred daily.

The reader must ask themselves just how this travesty of a “government” ever made it as far as it did? The word coined for this book as a government of “deviocracy” is extremely apt.

A man with little intelligence, little education, no ability to lead or plan…industry leaders who used the little man as their puppet…an enigma machine whose code was broken almost as soon as it was created…It was all so ludicrous.

The ending of this book comes as a huge surprise among many big surprises, no shocks. It is a delightful and delicious description of WWII from the inside of the Third Reich. The pages will absolutely fly by as the reader must learn what happens next. The ultimate price of selfishness and libertine behavior. I will read this book over again. It is very entrancing, very gripping.

The writing is riveting, The words sparse and to the point. The characters are (I would imagine) true to life. Brilliant characterization. As someone with a deep interest in WWII, I found this book to be a priceless addition to my library. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in WWII, or the psychology of hedonism or deviant politics.

I want to thank NetGalley and Troubador for forwarding to me a copy of this remarkable book for me to read , enjoy and review. The opinions expressed in this review are solely my own.