Teeth of the Wolf

April 1945: Berlin is being pulverized by Soviet guns. From his bunker Adolf Hitler sinking ever further into paranoia, orders the assassination of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, whom he believes to be a traitor to the Reich. Captain Karl-Heinz Hellmann, a man with growing misgivings about the German war effort, is ordered to Berlin, where Hitler himself assigns him the task of carrying out Göring's liquidation. He will have under his command a fanatically loyal German officer SS lieutenant Wrack, whose job it is to keep an eye on Hellmann, and a band of renegades, five members of the SS British Corps. These men, mostly prisoners of war with deeply anti-British feelings, have been inducted into the German SS. They include Englishmen, one a bitterly sardonic homosexual, the other an aristocratic traitor who betrayed his country to save his life; a French Canadian; an Anglo-Indian and a radical Irish nationalist. All have been promised forged papers and enough money to get them out of a vanquished Germany. In order to reach their objective inside Bavaria, which is largely occupied by the American army, they are forced to kill the crew of a US Army half-track. Now, pursued by the American army, they try to make their way to Göring's lair and their only hope of freedom. Based on historical fact concerning the existence of an SS unit made up of pro-Nazi turncoats, Teeth of the Wolf was a best-seller in France, where its author, Alain Paris, was compared to Len Deighton and Ken Follett.