Book Review: Shadows Walking by Douglas R. Skopp

Shad­ows Walk­ing by Dou­glas Skopp is a novel about a Nazi doc­tor bat­tling his con­scence after the war. While this novel was dif­fi­cult to read, it was also dif­fi­cult to put down.

Dr. Johann Bren­ner is an ide­al­is­tic man and a Ger­man nation­al­ist. Dr. Bren­ner has joined the Nazi party out of a sense of patri­o­tism and believes their pro­pa­ganda even though it clashes with his real world experiences.

After the war ended, Bren­ner has acci­dently taken on a new iden­tity and becomes a jan­i­tor in the cour­t­house where the Nurem­berg Tri­als are being heard. Try­ing to heal his con­scence, Bren­ner writes a let­ter to his wife which set up each chap­ter of the book.

One of the phe­nom­ena which, to me, is fas­ci­nat­ing is how peo­ple blindly fol­low oth­ers even though they know that the lead­ers are wrong, manip­u­la­tive or even worst, that what they are doing is against their own upbringing.

How could peo­ple who con­sider them­selves national social­ists (Nazis) act to this way towards their own fam­i­lies and neigh­bors? How could a régime train hun­dreds and thou­sands of peo­ple to mur­der civil­ians, chil­dren, women and the elderly? What hap­pened when one sud­denly real­izes that he or she is the "bad per­son" in the story of life?

This is one of the ques­tions Dou­glas R. Skopp is try­ing to answer in his fas­ci­nat­ing Shad­ows Walk­ing. In this book Skopp, who is a his­to­rian, uses Johann Bren­ner, a doc­tor from Bavaria, as the pro­tag­o­nist who ques­tions him­self over his role as a Nazi doc­tor in Auschwitz.

This is a bleak novel describ­ing some of the med­ical atroc­i­ties which hap­pened in con­cen­tra­tion camps in vivid detail. The pro­tag­o­nist, Dr. Johann Bren­ner, agrees to par­tic­i­pate in cas­tra­tion exper­i­ments on Jew­ish pris­on­ers. How Dr. Bren­ner comes to terms with his heinous acts as well as being con­flicted about the role that Jews played in the destruc­tion of Ger­many (accord­ing to Nazi pro­pa­ganda) weighed against his inti­mate knowl­edge of Jew­ish friends is one of the inter­est­ing angles of Shad­ows Walking.

Article Author: ManOfLaBook.com

A father, husband, avid reader, blogger, software engineer & wood worker who is known the world over as a man of many interests and to his wife as “an idiot”.

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