Читать книгу The Schneider Papers - David M Thomas - Страница 4

Summary

1936: Squadron Leader Harald Mason, a German-born naturalised British airman, is sent by a concerned Foreign Office to Berlin to unearth Luftwaffe expansion plans and investigate the sustainability of high-octane aviation fuel supply in times of war. A narrative of disparate characters, from the leonine intelligence chief Major Alastair Cartwright MC in London, to the clever and elegant Elisabeth Schneider, economist, and a Soviet spy embedded in IG Farben AG, the most powerful chemical combine in Europe. Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador to the Court of St James’, s needs something to turn national rancor away from the Soviet Union and towards Germany. It was Elisabeth who enlightened the Soviet NKVD to the extent of American banking and industry funding of the nascent pre-1933 Hitler regime, and subsequent Wall Street and business relationships with IG Farben. Mason befriends Werner Scribner, a technical draftsman, a Catholic and a Bavarian monarchist at the new Luftwaffe Air Ministry in Berlin – determined to bring down the Anti-Christ Hitler – juxtaposed with his father Klaus Scribner, who was spiritually re-born in the chaos that was Weimar Germany. It’s the conflict and accord of characters in a discorded and dangerous European world.

This is a story of American business funding Nazi Germany, and the rebuilding of Soviet Russia, as part of President FR Roosevelt’s New Deal programme to get ‘America working again.’