Nazis' Last Stand

MY PAST WAS AN EVIL RIVER (306 pp.) --George Millar--Doubleday ($2.50).

The meeting, in defeated Germany, of bored G.I.s, wary D.P.s and diehard SS men supplies obvious possibilities for an adventure story, and this one makes the most of them. Author Millar, 35, fought with the British in Egypt, with the Maquis in France, and wrote two exciting autobiographical books about it (Waiting in the Night, Horned Pigeon). His first novel, and his third book to be published in the U.S. in the past year, packs all its action and reflection into one week in May 1945, in a secluded Austrian valley --less than a week after V-E day.

There, as refugees, come Willy Wiede-meyer, old friend of Adolf Hitler, and his wife and daughters. Fat Willy, a character who is in some ways a dead ringer for "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, plans to sell his inside story of the Hitler household to the U.S. occupation authorities. Price: immunity for himself and family. But Willy falls into the hands of a cynical U.S. war correspondent posing as a captain, who wants the story but has no power to save Willy. Worse, a gang of fanatical SS men, still at large, moves into the valley and goes gunning for Willy.

Gustave, the weary French narrator, had known the SS years before in Dachau, whence he escaped to become a laborer on Frau Rehbach's farm. Gustave can look beyond frightened Willy to enjoy the Alpine spring. "There was still snow upon the summit of the Lady in White, which rose over the dark lake, dwarfing it as the cathedral tower dwarfs the rain puddle. . . ." While a detachment of U.S. troops is making a bordello out of the village inn, the SS men descend from the pine forests to seize Gustave and the Wiedemeyers.

Gustave describes how Kurt, the SS leader, "raised his gun and sighted it carefully at me. I tried not to look, but soon I had to raise my eyes. The tip of the foresight was a fraction below the level of his puckered eye, part of which showed in the aperture of the backsight. He was aiming at my throat. I had had them do that to me before in the camps. They aimed at you and stroked the trigger. For them it was like love making. They knew that you and they had the same thing in mind, the messiness and the pain of death and the amazing fragility of life. I dropped my eyes and shrugged my shoulders a little."

In its qualities of suspense and its Austrian atmosphere, Author Millar's story recalls Ethel Vance's best-selling novel Escape (TIME, Sept. 25, 1939). Not particularly profound, it is swift and very readable. As a novel it has a fault typical of most such efforts to recreate recent history: the writer has tried to include characters symbolic of everything, from France to the U.S. officer corps.

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