Summertime for Hitler and Germany





A Game of Lies [by] Rebecca Cantrell

New York, Tom Doherty Associates [2011]

978-0-7653-2733-8; $24.99

Hannah Vogel is a journalist and part-time spy for the British. Posing as travel reporter Adelheid Zinsli, and lover of Hauptsturmführer Lars Lang.  Hannah has been collecting Nazi secrets uncovered by Lang, her espionage partner, and has smuggled them to Switzerland. She has just returned to Germany, ostensibly to attend the 1936 Olympic Games and to report to a Swiss newspaper on the fencing.  On their first day, at the opening ceremony, Lang gets drunk, and Hannah is afraid of what will happen, especially since they are with a friend of Lang’s, a professor of chemistry at the University, who intimates that Lang is dangerous.

Hannah’s mentor, Peter Weill, has asked her to meet him at the games – he has a package to give her.  She doesn’t know what it is, and he does not get a chance to tell her.  He pulls out his flask, as always, so that they may sip a celebratory drink, and he dies.  She has taken a small sip, and becomes groggy and confused.  Lang takes her away from Peter’s dead body, not wanting to cause a scene.

Hannah feels imprisoned at Lang’s house.  He isn’t happy she’s complaining about his drinking, and they have words.  She flees to the streets, hoping to find solace and help from her friends – the people that she knew with Peter.  First she visits his sister, bringing her sunflowers. It’s an awkward visit – the police have said he died of a heart attack, but Hannah knows that’s not what it was. The sister does not know what the news was that made Peter so excited. On the way out, Hannah steals Peter’s notebook from where he hid it in an umbrella.

Hannah tries to make sense of the notes in Peter’s book, but she cannot. In her attempts to find allies amongst the friends she had once known, she finds only betrayal. Most of the Jewish ones no longer see her as a friend, but as someone who might turn them in.  They move away and turn their backs on her.  Only a couple of them end up helping, such as the woman doctor, who patches her up when Hannah is hit by a car.

When Peter’s sister is also killed, Hannah finds there is so much unknown all around her.  Those she thought she knew stand ready to betray her, and even those she thinks she knows now are questionable. She turns to Lang for help, and he finds the answers in Peter’s notebook, and they find corroboration from unexpected sources.

It looks like all is lost when she and Lang are taken by the Gestapo, but old friends actually do come to their aid, and Hannah is able to escape to Switzerland with some of the secrets, while Lars goes to Russia to attempt to find more answers at one of the training colonies there.

This is a race-against-the-clock thriller, full of cliff-hangers and close calls, compelling in its story-telling, against a background of intense fear, uncertainty, and growing madness.  The times moving up to WWII are not well-known in this country, but Cantrell brings them vividly to life with her stories of a plucky heroine versus remarkable odds, the strange bedfellows war – and pre-war – times make, and the chilling, but true, background to it all.  It’s like watching a great black-and-white film.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library book.