Jonathan Littell's epic novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones, 2006) consists of the memoirs of the fictitious Franco-German SS-Obersturmgruppenführer Dr. jur. Maximilien Aue. It focuses on his deployment as an SD intelligence officer on the Eastern Front, in the Caucasus, at Stalingrad, with the mobile Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine, and at Auschwitz. A Zelig figure of the war in Europe, he meets various historic and imagined characters, talks to French collaborators in occupied Paris, survives the siege of Berlin and an encounter with bands of Nazi Werewolves (roaming teenage guerrilla fighters), before he vanishes into anonymity in the chaos of the early postwar months. His memoirs relay in graphic detail persecution, murder and genocide, war crimes, battle scenes and sexual encounters. Interlaced with these events are revelations about his incestuous relationship with his twin sister Una, many passive homosexual experiences, and (possibly) his murder of his parents. After the war, Aue leads a quiet existence as a family man and director of a lace manufactory in the North of France.

The Kindly Ones was short-listed for six French literary prizes and garnered the two most prestigious ones, Le Prix Goncourt and Le Prix du roman de l'Académie française. It won praise from filmmaker Claude Lanzman and historian Pierre Nora; the Spanish Holocaust survivor and novelist Jorge Semprun endorsed it with superlatives. Yet there was no shortage of reviewers who denounced the novel as kitsch, pornographic, and exploitative in its attitude towards war and Holocaust.