This is a nonfiction book regarding a World War 2 German soldier whose duty was to command a concentration camp designed for the purpose of containing and killing of Jewish prisoners—prisoners of the German State and of the War. The author is a journalist who conducted extensive and thorough research into the subject of the book, Franz Stangl. His role as a servant of genocide in a Reich has its painful echo in the "ethnic cleansing" of this past decade in Bosnia and Croatia. Though the most recent victims are not Jews, the truth is that, pretty much the same kind of thing has been being repeated against a different group of people despite the horror with which the world responded to what happened to the Jews in Germany under the Nazi Party.