Customer Reviews

To the Victors the Spoils

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Colin MacInnes, who later went on to enjoy fame with such books as Absolute Beginners, served as a British intelligence officer towards the end of World War Two, charged with rooting out and arresting senior Nazi Party members. Out of his experience comes this disappointing book, which needs to lose at least a third of pages and virtually all its stilted, unconvincing and padded dialogue. When the characters aren't talking MacInnes does a good job of explaining how difficult the deNazification process was at a time when most former Nazis were lying through their teeth about party membership. To make matters more complicated, virtually all officials had been party members, which meant the Allies needed to employ them to have any chance of running the country effectively. MacInnes is also good when it comes to revealing the mass looting that British soldiers carried out and how some soldiers set themselves up as mini import-export corporations, totally ignoring the war in the effort to make money. But when these people open their mouths the result is usually trite and often far too long-winded. It really wrecks the flow of what could have been a much better book.