Helena P. Schrader’s “An Obsolete Honor” is an in-depth historical novel that centers on the efforts of German patriots to rid Germany of the Nazi government and its ruthless leader Adolph Hitler. Just after “An Obsolete Honor” was released, the movie “Valkyrie” came to theaters depicting the same thing, focusing on the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler. Schrader’s novel is not so much a chronicle of how the attempt failed; almost everybody knows the attempt failed. The novel centers more on why some people in Germany wanted to depose the Nazi government at all cost.

The attempt cost the conspirators dearly: five thousand were executed, including Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the famous “Desert Fox.” Its failure also cost Germany dearly: more Germans were killed in the nine months following the assassination attempt than were killed in the five years of war preceding the attempt. I was thirteen at the time. I often wondered why Providence allowed Hitler to so luckily escape such a well planned assassination. It’s probably something for us to ponder today as our own countries pursue similar objectives without any regard to the guiding of Providence.

I can sympathize with Schrader. It was people with ethnic connections to her own lineage that committed these crimes and that suffered such a brutal and total defeat at the hands of their enemies. The innocent as well as the guilty shared worldwide condemnation and reprisals as other countries both condemned the German people and punished the German nation. Unfortunately, however, this question of unwanted members of a society being written off as not human and subjected to widespread slaughter is still with us today.

Schrader researched her book for more than thirty years, interviewing survivors and traveling to many areas in Germany. She worked for the U.S. Foreign Service and was stationed for a while in Berlin. Her compassion for the Germans who opposed Nazi rule and the ruthless Nazi programs inspired her to first research the subject and then write her novel. She interviewed many survivors of Nazi Germany, even some who participated in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Her historical fiction novel has a mix of purely fictional characters as well as some real historical characters, but much of the story line and conversations are based on what she learned from her years of interviewing survivors. She does a very effective job through her fictional characters of showing what everyday life was like in Nazi Germany. For an historian, Schrader is a very accomplished novelist. Her characterization is excellent. The fictional characters seem to come alive as you read about them. You gradually realize the human and moral dilemma of many German people trapped in a war and a brutal ethnic cleansing policy they did not endorse and could not stop.

The fictional characters are a German General Staff officer Philip von Feldberg, the woman he falls in love with Alexandra Mollwitz, other members of both their families, and two young French women in German occupied France. Interesting to me is Schrader’s account of how the Nazis systematically marginalized Christian influenced in Germany. We see something similar in our own countries. Christian beliefs are excluded in school curriculums. Communal prayer and religious emblems and statues are prohibited on tax-supported property, and children are inundated with secular humanism rather than affirmation that a deity really exists. Similar training of young German children had been controlled by the Nazis both in schools and in the Hitler Youth Programs. Little wonder that these children grew up to so easily accept someone with Hitler’s moral character as the undisputed leader of Germany.

Schrader includes a list of main characters, which I found very helpful in remembering who’s who as I read the book. Her book also includes a listing of how all the characters, fictional and historical, fared after Germany’s defeat. The story starts on Christmas Eve, 1938, and ends on July 20, 1944, when the assassination attempt failed. Helena P. Schrader’s “An Obsolete Honor” is a very, interesting historical novel about a dismal episode in Western history that we today need to understand more analytically. This book is well worth the reading.