The Traitors Circle
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ESCAPE ARTIST
A THE ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Magnificent . . . Important and impressive'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Astonishing . . . Freedland is a master'
MICK HERRON
'Remarkable . . . This is how the best history books will be written in the future'
ANDREW ROBERTS
'Excellent . . . Perfect reading for this moment'
ANNE APPLEBAUM
'Utterly gripping, brilliantly researched and written'
ANTHONY HOROWITZ
'Compelling'
MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES
'Thrilling, humane, and deeply moving . . . Not to be missed'
DAVID McCLOSKEY
'Totally gripping and timely'
JONATHAN DIMBLEBY
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943. A group of high-society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo - revealing their secret to the Nazis' most ruthless detective.
They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador's widow and a pioneering headmistress. Meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule, what unites them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance. Or so they believe.
How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap? And who betrayed them?
Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich's cruellest men, they showed a heroism that raises a question with new urgency for our time: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dramatic study, Guardian columnist Freedland (The Escape Artist) explores the secretive world of upper-crust anti-Nazi activists in the Third Reich. The focus is on a 1943 Berlin tea party held by one such activist, Elisabeth von Thadden, the aristocratic head of a girls' school (where she eschewed "Heil Hitler" salutes). Guests included Otto Kiep, a Foreign Ministry official who was part of a clandestine government anti-Nazi ring, as well as Paul Reckzeh, a young doctor who applauded other guests' musings about overthrowing Hitler—only to later make a report to his Gestapo handlers. Fellow anti-Nazi government officials leaked the report to Kiep, who warned others about Reckzeh's allegiances, but not in time to save the tea partiers, most of whom were tortured and executed. The author also recaps the extraordinarily cinematic deeds of Countess Maria von Maltzan, a friend of von Thadden's who luckily skipped the party: she sheltered Jewish fugitives, harangued SS officers over their investigations, hid in a tree to evade searchlights and guard dogs, and shot a man in a Berlin sewer. Freedland makes his narrative into a tense cat-and-mouse game, pitting sadistic Nazi apparatchiks and their unsavory minions against prey whose considerable resources, privileged sense of entitlement, and sheer moxie give them a fighting chance. It's a thrilling account of the struggle against Nazism at its most up-close and nerve-wracking.
