The Occupying Power

Rating:
Summary: Compelling reading
Review: With Paris in the grip of the Nazi occupation, the small village of St.Blaize is comfortable with its collaboration with the enemy, electing to take the safe and easy way out of wartime privations. Louise, an American married to the Comte de Bernard,married him as a love match but has gradually come to despise his cowardice and acceptance of the Nazis as their masters. She has withdrawn to her own rooms and can barely bring herself to be civil to the Nazi officer, Major Minden, who is billeted with them while working on a deadly nerve gas. An OSS military saboteur, Savage, has been dropped behind enemy lines and makes his way to the Chateau de St.Blaize, posing as a Swiss cousin of Louise. There is an instant attraction between Louise and Savage but no chance to follow it through. Louise deliberately seduces Major Minden to obtain the laboratory key so that the nerve gas can be destroyed by Savage. The erratic sister of the Comte has become the lover of a violent and cruel SS officer, vierken, and betrays Louise to him as a threat. Vierken seizes all the children from the local school, ostensibly to send them to Germany but, in reality to kill them all as a way to ensure the cooperation of the villagers.Savage and the Comte rescue the children causing both the villagers and the Comte to join the resistance and to change themselves from cowards to patriots.