The Wrong Man for the Reich

Otto Klein never wanted to become important. He wanted a job. Unfortunately, he got a career.

Germany is changing, and Otto Klein has decided the safest response is to keep his head down, do his work, and stay as far away from politics as possible.

There is just one complication.

Otto's father is Jewish.

Then a bureaucratic mistake lands Otto a government position.

A misplaced order earns him praise. A terrible decision produces an unexpectedly brilliant result. His silence is mistaken for wisdom, his confusion for careful strategy, and his desperate attempts to avoid responsibility for extraordinary humility.

Before Otto understands what is happening, he is wearing an officer's uniform, attending classified meetings, collecting medals he isn't entirely sure he earned, and being promoted through the machinery of the Third Reich.

The more Otto gets wrong, the more everyone becomes convinced he's a genius.

Only one person knows better.

Jakob Rosenfeld, Otto's Jewish childhood friend, has found himself on the opposite side of the regime Otto accidentally serves. As Europe descends into war, their paths repeatedly cross in increasingly improbable circumstances-with Otto's mistakes sometimes becoming the very things that keep Jakob alive.

At first, Otto finds the government around him mostly ridiculous: endless forms, contradictory orders, pompous officials, meaningless titles, and departments that seem to spend more time fighting each other than fighting the war.

Then he begins to see where the paperwork leads.

People disappear.

Trains leave.

Names vanish from apartment doors.

And Otto finally understands that the absurd machine carrying him upward is also destroying millions of lives.

For the first time, Otto Klein decides to stop doing the right thing by accident.

He's going to do it on purpose.

There's only one problem.

Everyone is watching him now.

The Wrong Man for the Reich is a darkly comic historical novel about friendship, war, propaganda, conformity, bureaucracy, moral responsibility, and one spectacularly ordinary man's accidental rise through one of history's most terrifying regimes.

Sometimes history is shaped by great men.

Sometimes it is shaped by terrible men.

And sometimes somebody just signs the wrong form.