The Nero Decree
Half-brothers Dieter and Thomas Meier couldn’t be more different. Twenty-year-old Dieter is a member of the paramilitary SA, and he denounces his professor father as an enemy of the state. Father is taken to a camp, and diffident Thomas, just 17, leaves home forever. Fast-forward to April 1945. Dieter is a war-hardened SS officer, and Thomas is a doctor treating soldiers wounded by the advancing Russians. They meet again when Dieter is seriously wounded, and the once-diffident Thomas realizes he must attempt to thwart Dieter’s mission: the effort to “erase history” of the Final Solution and the transmission of the Nero Decree, Hitler’s order to destroy everything that might be of use to the Allies. Although Thomas’ metamorphosis into a man of action isn’t well explained, Lee’s novel offers a brilliant portrayal of the utter chaos of the final weeks of the Third Reich, the horrors of Nazism, the German people’s well-warranted fear of the brutality of the Russian onslaught, and the privations suffered by all Germans.The Nero Decreeis stunningly bleak but difficult to put down.