At its appearance in 2006, the weighty novel by Jonathan Littell about the persecution of Jews during the Second World War was praised and criticized at the same time. The shocking thing about The kindly ones (De welwillenden) is that it is told from the point of view of a culprit, SD officer Max Aue. He is a bureaucrat through and through. Aue uses words that are so far away from his horrible practice that he himself feels as little disgust as possible. Littell shows us that the Third Reich was not overly populated by monsters or perverts, but by normal civilians, who collectively shifted in the direction of total insanity as a result of national socialism. The theatre adaptation concentrates on Aues residence in Kiev, Stalingrad and Berlin. Each city is a step closer to the complete apocalypse.