The Dead Man in the Bunker

Description

1947: a man is found murdered in the high mountains that straddle the Italian border with Austria. He is not what his papers claim him to be: the scars on his face could only have come from duelling, the mark of a man who was once a member of an extreme nationalist fraternity. He is in fact Dr Gerhard Bast, former head of the Gestapo in the Austrian town of Linz. A few years before, his affair with a married woman led to the birth of a son, Martin Pollack, who in his maturity sets out to discover what kind of man his father was, and to discover why his father's parents - his loving grandparents - were such ardent, unrepentant Nazis long after the war. The journey he takes becomes a venture into the heart of one family's and of Europe's darkness. Confronting his father's record in unflinching detail, Pollack gathers evermore shocking evidence of mass murder and moral emptiness. Interspersed in this are memories of his adoring grandparents, who never for a moment acknowledged what their son had done or ceased to hate Jews and Slavs. Uniquely intimate, painful and honest, The Dead Man in the Bunker is a deeply powerful book about the perpetrators of genocide.

Martin Pollack, born in Austria in 1944, is a highly acclaimed journalist, editor, writer and translator. The Dead Man in the Bunker is his third book, and the first to be published in English.

"'The author's skilful melding of archival research and unfolding revelations makes a gripping story.' Annette Kobak, Sunday Times"