Knight's Cross: A Novel - Hardcover

Nathanson, E. M.; Bank, Aaron

3.51

35 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559721685 ISBN 13: 9781559721684

Publisher: Birch Lane Pr, 1993

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In a novel based on real events, a crack commando team assembled by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II heads into Germany in 1945 with orders to kidnap Hitler and other Nazi leaders. By the author of The Dirty Dozen.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

The author of A Dirty Distant War (1987), etc., teams up with a career soldier/spy on a thriller about a top-secret OSS effort to round up Hitler and his cronies before they can commit suicide or otherwise escape the crashing Third Reich. Inter- and intra-service rivalries provide the bulk of the infrequent tense spots in the last days of the war in Europe. Captain Dan Brooks has been ordered by the Office of Strategic Services to drop into the Austrian Alps, where it's believed the top Nazis are preparing a superbunker to defend themselves forever from the advancing Allies. Brooks's project is plagued from the get-go by the intelligence-collecting side of OSS, where an ambitious Navy officer and his team of German-American spies think themselves better suited to go after the F hrer, while Brooks shrugs them off and flies to France to recruit nearly 200 hundred disillusioned Wehrmacht POWs, all but one of whom want dearly to knock off the men who have ruined their beloved Vaterland. Trained and equipped to pose as German mountain troops, the agents parachute into the Austrian Alps, then settle into barns and attics belonging to the local Nazi-haters. Brooks sends out a couple of his American lieutenants in Gestapo clothes to gather intelligence, and the fake cops quickly find that, while there aren't yet any really big Nazis in town, there are some really pesky Americans, the agents Brooks tangled with in back in London, as well as Russians who have their own plans for the German leaders. Dan gets things straightened out in time for the arrival of a mysteriously and heavily bandaged fugitive and his SS bodyguards. Is the man in the mummy suit Der F hrer? Everything is sorted out, and justice more or less served, months later in Switzerland, where Allen Dulles makes a cameo appearance. Ponderous ``what-if?'' epic. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this disappointingly unimaginative and mostly actionless novel, Nathanson ( The Dirty Dozen ) and Bank ( From OSS to Green Berets ) take as their plot premise a real-life OSS plan--in which Bank was involved as a young officer--to capture Hitler and his high-ranking henchmen during the final days of WW II. In late 1944, OSS captain Dan Brooks interviews hundreds of German POWs throughout Allied-occupied Europe and assembles a team of disgruntled soldiers willing to fight against their homeland. Dubbed "Knight's Cross," the project clothes the defectors and German-speaking OSS agents in captured enemy uniforms and sends them to pose as a mountain infantry company in the Austrian Tyrol, the area to which Hitler is expected to flee. The Soviets find out about the plan and launch a competing venture of their own, a complicating factor that makes it impossible for anyone--including the reader--to know for sure who's doing what to whom. Bank's knowledge of OSS procedure is evident, but slow pacing and a plot that fizzles early hobble what might have been an interesting collaboration.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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