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I'm now about half way through Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell - which I started immediately after reading it the translation, 'The Kindly Ones' - it's such a good, and important book, that I just had to read it in the original. It's the fictional memoir of an SS Officer who served in the Eastern Front, then Stalingrad, and then for the fall of Berlin ... on the one hand it functions in much the same way as War and Peace (to which it has been compared frequently) in using war and a detailed study of military functions and tactic as a backdrop for wider ranging and spectacular moral/philosophical explorations, but it's real strength is in the depiction of the atrocities of the Nazis as a bureaucratic function of an elaborate state apparatus, cloaked in legality and an illusion of order and dialectic ... and how persuasive that machinery was in allowing even intellectual, educated individuals to rationalise to themsleves what they did. I can't recommend it enough, even though it's definitely not an 'easy' book - it comes in at about 1000 pages, and I imagine that if you have no knowledge of German language and history certain parts would be a little confusing (although there's an excellent glossary at the back) - but the rewards are enormous, not least in the diversions and sub-plots (there are pages on pages of discussions of east -European lingustics, for example, which somehow manages to be fascinating) and there are ceratin set-pieces - like a dialectic comparisan of communism and National Socialism between Aue, the SS Officer and a captured Soviet Commisar - that are sublimely satisfying.