Rex Last is a retired professor emeritus of Modern Languages who spent a lifetime's work in publishing, editing, writing, translation (including the wartime memoirs of Willy Brandt) and more, who also pioneered computer applications in language learning. In retirement, he edited a monthly computer magazine, then turned his hand to novel writing and campaigning for the 'informal carer' of loved ones with dementia, caring for his own wife until her death in 2023.His novels focus on the challenges facing anti-Nazi Germans who seek to undermine the all-embracing machine of Hitler's Third Reich.
In the tranquil farming village of Altersdorf in Bavaria, most of the young maintain a healthy cynicism about the Nazi movement, but one zealous youth among them, Eberhardt Langer, is lured away to the city to join the movement. One bright summer day in August 1940, while the villagers – men, women and children – were gathering a bumper crop of their annual wheat harvest, this remote little village of Altersdorf is destroyed. The few survivors are in anguish and vow to avenge the death of their loved ones and the destruction of their homes and beloved village. In France, a French Resistance group manages to get hold of a briefcase containing Top Secret documents which are then delivered to a town house in central London. These documents mention Altersdorf, so London sends two of their best to investigate. Meanwhile, one of the men of the village who had moved to the city meets with a secret group of businessmen called the Pleiades, who formulate a scheme to disrupt the Nazis’ plans.
A huge confidence trick is being prepared to persuade the Nazis that there is an anti-gravity weapon in development at a secret location in an island of the Outer Hebrides. The objective is to deploy this supposed device as a Trojan horse to infiltrate the German secret research facility
In Nuremberg a small group of citizens resolves to fight back against the pitiless dominance of the Nazi régime.
