I demoni di Berlino

Berlin, February 27, 1933. At nine o’clock in the evening the city streets are deserted because of the bitter cold. Until that moment, the evening is identical to many others marking the end of the German winter. But in an instant everything changes: the city’s firefighters receive an excited call. They have to rush to the Reichstag, the parliament, because someone has started a fire. Also arriving on the scene, all too quickly, are Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, who waste no time in pointing out the perpetrators of the attack: the Communists. Within hours, the secretary of the increasingly powerful National Socialist Party calls for and obtains a state of emergency. And within months, he wins the election with 44 percent of the vote. But who really hatched the plot of the attack that triggered the most tragic concatenation of events in human history? Who was aware of these plans? And who, despite knowing, did not intervene? Or perhaps someone tried to? Someone who now lives in Vienna and earns a living as a janitor; someone who has to leave a hair between the doorframe and the front door handle every time he leaves the house; someone who hides a gun under his coat. Someone who was known as Commissioner Sigfried Sauer of the Munich Police. A few nights before the fire, Sauer was lured to Berlin by an old acquaintance, Inspector Karl Julian, who informed him that Rosa, the woman with whom the former commissioner was in love, had joined the Resistance and disappeared. In the capital, intrigue, assassinations, shady power plays, and betrayals multiply as Sauer tries to track down Rosa and unravel the intricate plots woven by the warring political forces. Helping him is Johanna Tegel, the only woman operative in the police criminal section. But History will soon burst violently into their lives.