Herrenvolk

Name: Herrenvolk
Rating: 4.5 (93 reviews)

by Peter Darman Book 1 in the Redemption series.

First published 2025

Amazon

4.3(93)

Set in central and eastern Europe in 1945, during the collapse of Nazi Germany and the final battles of the Eastern Front, in the closing months of World War II, Axel Steiner, a young German soldier, fights desperately on the collapsing Eastern Front in the defence of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, Hannah Katz, a young Hungarian Jew, endures the unspeakable horrors of a concentration camp when she is forcibly evicted from her home in Budapest, clinging to memories of her family and the faint hope of freedom.
As Soviet forces push west and the German Army disintegrates, Axel fights to survive against overwhelming odds. Hannah is also fighting her own battle of survival against a murderous regime that wants to work her to death, either that or send her to the gas chamber. As the war in Europe ends, fate brings the two together. But can survival lead to forgiveness, or is the divide between the two too deep?

In 1945 Soviet armies pushed through Poland and eastern Germany while Nazi concentration camps continued to kill prisoners even as the regime collapsed. German units fought desperate defensive battles and civilians fled westward. The novel places Axel's military disintegration beside Hannah's struggle to survive the Holocaust, making the end of the war a simultaneous experience of defeat, liberation, guilt and trauma.

The two novels concentrate on people forced to live with the moral consequences of mass violence after the battlefield itself has moved on. Military survival, Jewish displacement, guilt and the possibility of forgiveness remain personal questions even as the setting shifts from the ruins of the Third Reich to the creation of Israel.

Neither novel treats the end of a battle as the end of its consequences. Memories of persecution and service continue to influence trust, love and political commitment, while displaced people are forced to make new homes in societies already under strain. The historical events remain large, but the story stays centred on what those events demand from individuals who cannot simply return to the lives they had before the war.