Crooked Cross

A long-lost 1934 British novel—never before published in the U.S.—that warned of Hitler’s rise through the story of an ordinary German family during six fateful months in 1933; it has been hailed as “a surprise breakout success” and “a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper” in the UK.

The Klugers are a tight-knit, middle-class family living in a picturesque mountain village in Bavaria. As 1932 draws to a close, Herr Kluger is dismayed by the growing popularity of the Nazi Party but aware of its leader’s charisma: he warns his two sons, “Don’t you know that to hear that chap speak is to believe everything he says for twenty-four hours?” To his sons, however, the Party offers not only employment prospects but also meaning and purpose—a powerful draw for a generation of youth whose life chances had been decimated by Germany’s defeat in the Great War. Helmy, the sensitive elder brother, joins the Party with some reluctance, but his brother Erich soon becomes a true believer.

Their beloved sister Lexa, meanwhile, finds her engagement to her longtime sweetheart, a talented young surgeon named Moritz Weissman, under threat. The half-Jewish Moritz was raised Catholic but it becomes increasingly clear that will not protect him, and Lexa’s family urges her to break things off. She continues to see Moritz secretly, but as Hitler becomes Chancellor, laws restricting Jews are passed, Dachau is opened, and armed thugs roam the streets rounding up “enemies of the state,” history closes in on the young lovers, culminating in a dramatic attempted escape over the mountains to Austria.