Hannes Klar, a novel

Hannes Klar is the story of a young boy who, growing up as a member of the Hitler Youth, becomes a Nazi soldier and through the various events of his life redeems himself for the atrocities he has committed. It is a work of fiction, but it is based on a real person, a person who became a friend of the author and provided the memoirs from which the novel was written.

Our story opens in August of 1991. We are in Moscow, and it is the time of the August coup when Russia's hard-line conservative communists have placed Gorbachev under house arrest and are moving their tanks toward Yeltsin's barricade at the Praesidium. Hannes, now sixty-seven, has come to Moscow to stand up for Yeltsin. At the end of the first chapter, as he sees the Russian tanks approaching, he thinks to himself, "I have seen this before."

When the page turns, we are in Kaiserslautern, Germany. It is now 1937, and a thirteen-year-old Hannes is standing with his mother at a parade watching Hitler's tanks rolling down the main thoroughfare. From this point until the end of our story, we follow Hannes's life, eventually returning to Moscow and the oncoming Russian army.

It is a life of great trauma and transformation. Hannes becomes a paratrooper in WW II. He is ordered to kill part of the population of Novgorod when he is dropped behind the Russian lines during the battle of Leningrad. Later, he is injured at Stalingrad and forced to spend months in recovery. He becomes a POW and escapes, but his best friend is killed, his girl friend bombed in Hamburg, his home and parents destroyed. He sees Dachau first-hand and gradually realizes that he has been victimized by Hitler's propaganda. He begins to change.

He marries Anna, a Jewish obstetrical nurse who has escaped from Dachau. He becomes an electrical engineer, and travels with his wife to Scotland and eventually America. As the years go by, Anna helps him in his moral and spiritual transformation. Eventually he realizes that his redemption will not be complete until he helps the people of Russia whom he once fought against. We follow his journey back to the beginning of the novel and to the fate which awaits him at the Praesidium.

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