The book is narrated by its fictional protagonist Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer of French and German ancestry who was a Holocaust perpetrator and was present during several major events of World War II.

"[2] When asked why he wrote such a book, Littell invokes a photo he discovered in 1989 of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a female Soviet partisan hanged by the Nazis in 1941.

[3] He adds that a bit later, in 1992, he watched the movie Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, which left an impression on him, especially the discussion by Raul Hilberg about the bureaucratic aspect of genocide.

He is the director of a lace factory, has a wife, children, and grandchildren, though he has no real affection for his family and continues his homosexual encounters when he travels on business.

« Allemande I & II »: Aue describes his service as an officer in one of the Einsatzgruppen extermination squads operating in Ukraine, as well as later in the Caucasus (a major theme is the racial classification, and thus fate, of the region's Mountain Jews[11]).

Although he seems to become increasingly indifferent to the atrocities he is witnessing and sometimes taking part in, he begins to experience daily bouts of vomiting and suffers a mental breakdown.

After taking sick leave, he is transferred to Otto Ohlendorf's Einsatzgruppe D only to encounter much hostility from his new SS colleagues, who openly spread rumours of his homosexuality.

After he fails in this task, due to political pressure from the beleaguered Army, his disappointed commanding officer arranged that he be transferred to the doomed German forces at Stalingrad in late 1942.

« Sarabande »: Convalescing in Berlin, Aue is awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, by the SS chief Heinrich Himmler himself, for his duty at Stalingrad.

« Menuet en rondeaux »: Aue is transferred to Heinrich Himmler's personal staff, where he is assigned an at-large supervisory role for the concentration camps.

« Gigue »: Accompanied by his friend Thomas, who has come to rescue him, and escorted by a violent band of fanatical and half-feral orphaned German children, Max makes his way through the Soviet-occupied territory and across the front line.

Barely escaping when the Soviets storm the tunnels and kill one of the policemen, Aue wanders aimlessly in the ruined streets of war-torn Berlin before deciding to make a break for it.

The readers know from the beginning of the book that Aue's perfect mastery of the French language will allow him to slip away back to France with a new identity as a returning Frenchman.

[12] The Spectator's literary reviewer, Anita Brookner, based on her reading of the novel in the original French, described the book as a "masterly novel ... diabolically (and I use the word advisedly) clever.

It is also impressive, not merely as an act of impersonation but perhaps above all for the fiendish diligence with which it is carried out ... presuppose(s) formidable research on the part of the author, who is American, educated in France and writing fluent, idiomatic and purposeful French.

"[22] The Observer's Paris correspondent, Jason Burke, praised the book as an "extraordinary Holocaust novel asks what it is that turns normal people into mass killers," adding that "notwithstanding the controversial subject matter, this is an extraordinarily powerful novel.

"[27] Some criticised it from a historical perspective, calling the novel a "strange, monstrous book" and alleging it is "full of errors and anachronisms over wartime German culture.

[29] The New Republic's literary critic Ruth Franklin called it "one of the most repugnant books I have ever read [...] if getting under the skin of a murderer were sufficient to produce a masterpiece, then Thomas Harris would be Tolstoy.

"[11] Michiko Kakutani, the principal book critic of The New York Times, called the novel "[w]illfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent" and went on to question the "perversity" of the French literary establishment for praising the novel.

It’s a dreadful, compelling, brilliantly researched, and imagined masterpiece, a terrifying literary achievement, and perhaps the first work of fiction to come out of the Holocaust that places us in its very heart, and keeps us there.

"[31] Writing for Time, American writer and journalist Lev Grossman compared it to Roberto Bolaño's 2666, similar in "their seriousness of purpose, their wild overestimation of the reader's attention span and their interest in physical violence that makes Saw look like Dora the Explorer," but added that while far from perfect, The Kindly Ones "is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer, if not an especially disciplined one.

"[32] In her review for Los Angeles Times, novelist and essayist Laila Lalami wrote: "Jonathan Littell has undertaken a very ambitious project in The Kindly Ones, and I think his boldness deserves to be commended.

In the end, however, his highly problematic characterization and awkward handling of point of view make this book far more successful as a dramatized historical document than as a novel.

[34] Jonathan Derbyshire, culture editor of the New Statesman, called it "a remarkable novel" and its protagonist "a convincing witness to the defining moral catastrophe of the 20th century.

The result is a sprawling, daring, loose-ended monster of a book, one that justifies its towering subject matter by its persistent and troubling refusal to offer easy answers and to make satisfying sense.

"[36] Writing for The Guardian, British author James Lasdun criticized the novel for "some large flaws" such as its main character, "a ghoul belonging more to the fictional universe of, say, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho", and provocative use of anachronisms, but called it a "monumental inquiry into evil.

"[37] In The Spectator, British journalist and biographer Patrick Marnham wrote: "Dr Aue cannot be brought to trial because he does not exist; on the other hand, he can give us something even more valuable than vengeance, something that no real war criminal can manage, and that is total honesty.