The narration of the convinced Nazi and SS officer Maximilien Aue takes us to several different locations of the Second World War, to the front, to the occupied areas and to the hinterland. The text is conceived as Aue's fictional memoir written long after the war; Aue does not defend himself in them, but rather tries to explain in his own way how and why one small cog in a horrible deadly machine works. For his monumental excursion into the soul of a small fish among war criminals, Jonathan Littell received the Grand Prize of the French Academy and the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2006.