Ilyana eBook

Berlin born Max Rieker grows up in an orphanage in the turbulent years of Germany’s Weimar and Nazi periods. As one of millions of youths, young Rieker is sucked in by the causative wave of events that rocked the nation after its catastrophic defeat in WWI.

Considered an archetypical Aryan, Rieker has an insatiable appetite for life and becomes an outstanding boxer and elite soldier in Adolf Hitler’s personal unit, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler. His years spent in the Hitler Youth were the best of his life. Here, he enjoys the adventures and shares the camaraderie with boys of his own ilk: life is seen through rose-coloured glasses back then.  He’d embraced the Party’s doctrine of ‘pure race’ because it fitted in with his own earlier beliefs of a race directly descended from the gods.

Alas, the transition from boy to adult, gives rise to tastes that sour his personal code of honour: they conflict with how he imagined a master race should conduct itself. The gap widens in the war years when he discovers vast differences between those in his Waffen-SS unit, young men who fought for their country, and those of Allgemeine-SS; ‘political’ desk-bound individuals and the brutal einsatzkommandos who blindly carry out the unconscionable mandates of the Party. Inevitably ‘politics’ overflows into the field and for Rieker signals a rude awakening shattering the adventurous heart-set dreams he’d readily embraced in his early years. Forced to comply with orders that seriously threaten his personal values a dark side infests his mind; fear, guilt and anger become his most unwelcome demons. Struggling to confront the truth and seek redemption, he finds that there is no short cut back to the ‘noble warrior’ soul of his youth.

All this and bearing witness to the sad attrition of his comrades fighting the merciless Russian Campaign, vastly outnumbered against a fanatical enemy, where atrocity is an everyday occurrence, renders Rieker hard pressed to maintain his sanity; reality becomes a harsh teacher. Any remaining acceptance to master race and his Fuhrer is blown away when his Jewish Ukrainian sweetheart, Irina is killed. Members of the dreaded Einsatzgruppe are responsible.  Rieker’s verve for life turns into a venomous hatred for the ‘line management’ who mindlessly implement its cruel doctrine. He sets out to defy the ‘System’ and together with his commanding officer, Paul von Wittenburg, save a young Ukrainian child, Ilyana (the title of the book) from the hangman’s noose.

A not to be missed finale involves conspiracy, murder, summary execution, insubordination and sentencing to Majdanek, a German concentration camp in Poland - a hell on earth, where Rieker and two of his fellow NCO’s, Fritz Kohler and Hans Muller have only themselves to blame for the choices they’d made during their journey forward. Believing it couldn’t get any worse, the past returns to haunt them when their ruthless camp overseer Beicher, the Butcher, turns out to be a former einsatzkommando whom Rieker had almost bludgeoned to death in a boxing contest 4-years earlier. Beicher vows they will never serve out their sentences, but Rieker and his comrades have their own agenda.

They pull off a daring escape but at a heart wrenching price. Barely alive and mentally broken Rieker reaches Berlin to link up with his beloved sister, Greta, for what he knows will be a final farewell.

As for the doctrine of ‘Pure Race’ Rieker settles for his own understanding etched from bitter experience fighting on the frozen killing plains of an unforgiving Eastern Front. A surprising ending illustrates the triumph of spirit over the ills of Mankind.