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OFF LIMITS (466 pp.)--Hans Habe--Frederick Fell ($4.95).

This book might have borrowed its title more appropriately from Noel Coward's World War II ditty, Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans. Though Novelist Habe (real name: Jean Bekessy) is Hungarian-born, he peddles the familiar made-in-Germany apologia that most Germans were as innocent as the children of Hamelin town, and that only the wicked Pied Piper of Berchtesgaden seduced them into evil ways. More surprising. Novelist Habe, who rose to the rank of major in the U.S. Army, was decorated, and served with the occupation forces, argues that the Americans have acted as louts and barbarians preying on a helpless, suffering people. In this false equation, miscarriages of justice such as the imprisonment of non-Nazis or the cavalier requisitioning of German homes are treated as the vicious equivalent of murdering 6,000,000 Jews.

In Germany Off Limits is already a bestseller. The crass coating of sex and corn on this propaganda pill, plus the easygoing American tendency to let bygones be bygones, may make the book almost as successful in the U.S., although it is rubbish. Off Limits mounts hundreds of unrelated, postage-stamp vignettes of the occupation years 1945 to 1951 side by side. Amid the meandering plots and subplots, readers will meet the following unattractive Americans: an intelligence major who forms a sado-masochistic liaison with the Ile Koch-like widow of a concentration-camp commandant, a Jewish captain who allows a German family to stay on in the home he has improperly requisitioned in order to seduce the daughter of the house, a well-meaning colonel who quits rather than carry out the conflicting orders of Washington politicos who all "have rocks in their heads," assorted privates and corporals who force the imprisoned wives of erstwhile Nazi bigwigs to lick the paint off Hitler portraits. The Germans, on the other hand, are almost all noble.

Author Habe seeks to temper his anti-Americanism with organ-tone laments about history being bigger than both peoples and no nation being fit to judge another. Americans need not fear criticism, or insulate their consciences from an accounting of the wrongs the U.S. can and does commit. But this book does not really offer such an accounting. Instead, it offers Author Habe's strange verdict that the U.S., acting in good faith, has done more harm to Europe than the nation which, twice within a quarter-century, launched total war.

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