Crooked Cross describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis’ growth in power. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world. The main focus of the novel is on disaffected German youth: it shows with great subtlety that by the early 1930s there was huge unemployment, and a corresponding feeling of futility, and that what the Nazis did so skilfully was to provide a sense of purpose. Crooked Cross is the best account we've read of why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored turn towards authoritarian governments.

The heroine of the novel, Lexa, watches her brothers being seduced by National Socialism, as she observes her Catholic fiancé losing his job because he has a Jewish name and, by the summer of ’33, is deprived of basic human rights like sitting on a park bench. But despite the grimness of all this, the novel remains intensely readable as it implicitly asks the question: how could the country of Beethoven and Goethe, Freud and the Bauhaus, be descending into barbarism? Why would the rest of the world not intervene before it was too late?