At the turn of the year 1940 to 1941, the camp doctor decides to refuse to testify that deaths are due to harmless causes when it is clear that the guards brutally kill the prisoners.
His complaint causes a courageous senior public prosecutor in the Third Reich to investigate, taking camp leaders and supervisors in custody, working fifteen months on a court case that also aims to bring the office workers behind it to justice.
The last third of the novel shows how in postwar Austria the old Nazi elite in the village quickly make new careers in the new major parties, ÖVP and SPÖ, and how the perpetrators of the Second Republic are mostly sentenced to minor fines while people who have been persecuted on racial grounds are once again excluded.
Laher frequently uses offensively a fast-paced, utilitarian, cynical and tough language of the Nazis, which hardly leaves room for empathy and which immediately fascinates the reading public, when speed is removed and the fate of an individual is briefly singled out: The structures of barbarism displace the acting characters as "heros".
[citation needed] "Just because it adheres to the specific facts of a regionally limited case, which, however, because of the design of the literature, obtains inherent generality and so this book succeeds in a statement on the nature of National Socialism and its tenacious survival, as it is rarely shown so clearly and convincingly" writes Anna Mitgutsch in her review of Herzfleischentartung in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard.
With a very slightly translucent, sage and sometimes even witty language, he seduces one to lay down a little bit the emotional defenses that one has rightly placed for such literature and achieves even in causing feelings of disbelief and dismay in jaded people.
[7] Laher himself, who is very much involved in promoting a comprehensive quality of education in Austria,[8] holds numerous readings and lectures on his book and its underlying issues.