Steven Hartov - The Soul Of A Thief

In the spring of 1944, I realized that I was not going to survive the war...

Shtefan Brandt, adjutant to a colonel of the Waffen SS, has made it through the war so far in spite of his commander’s habit of bringing his staff into combat, and a pair of secrets that are far more dangerous than the battlefield. Shtefan is a Mischling and one of the thousands of German citizens of Jewish descent who have avoided the death camps by concealing themselves in the ranks of the German army. And he is in love with Gabrielle Belmont, the colonel’s French mistress. Either of those facts could soon mean his end, were Colonel Erich Himmel to notice.

Colonel Himmel has other concerns, however. He can see the war’s end on the horizon and recognizes that he is not on the winning side, no matter what the reports from Hitler’s generals may say. So he has taken matters into his own hands, hatching a plot to escape Europe. To fund his new life, he plans to steal a fortune from the encroaching Allies. A fortune that Shtefan, in turn, plans to steal from him...

Atmospheric and intense, The Soul of a Thief captures the turbulent emotional rush of those caught behind the lines of occupied France, where one false step could spell death, and every day brings a new struggle to survive.

STEVEN HARTOV is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller In the Company of Heroes, as well as The Night Stalkers and Afghanistan on the Bounce, and the author of the espionage trilogy The Heat of Ramadan, The Nylon Hand of God and The Devil’s Shepherd. For six years he served as editor-in-chief of Special Operations Report. A former Merchant Marine sailor, Israel Defense Forces paratrooper and special operator, he currently resides in New Jersey.

www.StevenHartov.com

The Soul of a Thief

Steven Hartov

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Steven Hartov 2018

Steven Hartov asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9781474083652

Praise for The Soul of a Thief

“An old-fashioned ‘ripping yarn’ from a master writer who knows how to keep the characters vivid, the plot twisting, and the action coming hot and heavy.”

—Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire

“Steven Hartov takes us on an SS commando’s headlong rush across German-occupied Europe from France to the battlefield of Russia and back again just in time for D-day, in the company of a brutally efficient SS colonel and his decidedly non-Aryan adjutant. Hartov tells a story about Nazis and Jews on the same side of the front lines that few could have conceived but the likes of which had to have happened. Between the spring of 1943 and the summer of 1944 The Soul of a Thief packs a lifetime of human experiences into a year of European wartime.”

—Alex Rosenberg, author of The Girl from Krakow

“Hartov offers a novel and human perspective of the German side of the Second World War through the eyes of one young reluctant recruit and the enigmatic colonel whom he admires, fears and, ultimately, plots to outwit.”

—Daniel Kalla, bestselling author of The Far Side of the Sky and Nightfall Over Shanghai

“Steven Hartov’s WWII novel The Soul of a Thief is a literary tour de force on par with Mark Sullivan’s Beneath a Scarlet Sky for three simple reasons: he knows his history, he writes with the beauty of Fitzgerald, and he loves his characters. This is an outstanding historical fiction novel illuminating a little-known aspect of the German war machine: the half- and quarter-Jews known as Mischlinge fighting, sometimes willingly, on behalf of Hitler’s Third Reich.”

—Samuel Marquis, author of Bodyguard of Deception and Altar of Resistance

“The Soul of a Thief is a war drama, a cat-and-mouse thriller and a coming-of-age love story, all wrapped into a terrific and compulsive read.”

—Daniel Kalla, bestselling author of The Far Side of the Sky

For my mother, Trudy, who survived, thrived and told me and Susie the stories. And for Lia, who loves and believes.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Author Note

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Afterword

Historical Notes

About the Publisher

Author Note

I DO NOT KNOW the origin of this story. One autumn night some years ago, I woke up and began to write it, as if compelled to do so. I am generally a practical man, but this tale flowed forth as if commanded by some otherworldly force, and I was just the vessel of its telling. Alarmed at first, I soon looked forward to each night of work, to hear the next part of the tale and honor it as best I could. I also realized then, that this memoir is more than an invention of imagination, as it first came to me in recurring dreams when I was still a child.

There is no one to thank, except perhaps the ghost who told it through my fingers, and all those who indulged me, as I wrote and wondered where it came from.

I

IN THE SPRING of 1944, I realized that I was not going to survive the war.

There was, upon this revelation resisted for so long, a sublime unburdening of tension, a sensation of relief and release I had not enjoyed since being expelled as a boy from a Catholic public school in Vienna. After all, my survival until this point had been predicated upon a carefully executed waltz of luck and deception. But now, rather like a skilled player of Chemin de Fer who wins too long at the table, my good fortunes could not but fade, and my fatigue was draining my abilities to deceive.

I should make it clear that I did not harbor what the famed Viennese psychologists then termed as suicidal tendencies. Quite the contrary, I was a survivor by strength of will and character. However, some factors made it clear that emerging in one piece from this worldwide conflagration, with myself at its epicenter, was highly unlikely.

I was the young adjutant to an SS colonel named Himmel, whose actions reflected exactly the opposite of his heavenly moniker.

I was also, on paper, a Catholic named Brandt, yet in fact the descendant of a great-grandmother named Brandeis.