The German Old Boy

About the Book

In January 1941, a young German physicist, Hans Kassel, outwardly seems to be positioned to experience a safe war, assuming his Berlin laboratory is spared by Allied bombers.  But there is much more to Kassel’s life than the differential equations on his blackboard and the  experimental radar sets on his workbench.  From the time he was a schoolboy in his mother’s England and then a university student there and in his native Hamburg, he has been at complete odds with Adolf Hitler and the direction he is taking Germany.  This mounting antipathy is reinforced when he sees neighbors and friends picked up and imprisoned and when his Wehrmacht officer brother returns from Poland with tales of Nazi atrocities.  As the war gets underway, Kassel starts attending resistance meetings where there is more and more talk of ridding the country of Hitler and his gang.

Kassel’s outward life, and his shadow one,  suddenly get doubly complicated and challenging, however, when he is ordered into uniform and dispatched on a perilous mission to Great Britain somehow to capture a cavity magnetron, a hugely important advance in radar technology which the Allies have and the Germans do not.  His knowledge of England and its language give him a distinct advantage, but this turns out to be a two-edged sword as he  quickly is spotted by a former school mate and British counterintelligence, MI5, is soon on his trail.  

Kassel’s race to locate a cavity magnetron and MI5's attempts to head him off make for exciting reading in this novel which is part espionage, part armed combat, part politics.  Kassel remains enough of a German patriot to stick with his mission, but his hatred of the Nazi regime is always there, right up to the day in July 1944 when the resistance movement has its greatest day, and its final one, as Hitler escapes an assasination attempt by a mere whisker.

Richard Wight’s grounding as a communications executive in the world of high technology, his experience as an Army Signal Corps officer, his familiarity with Great Britain and his acquired knowledge of the resistance movement in Nazi Germany are all put to use in this top-notch story.  Although fictional, it is based in part on real events. And it includes people who lived, from the scientists who invented the cavity magnetron, to Winston Churchill, to the German aristocrats, army officers and, remarkably, members of German military intelligence, who were among the leaders of the resistance movement. The German Old Boy breaks new ground in a genre of literature that has continued to attract readers for decades.

About the Author

Richard Wight is well equipped to take on this World War II tale of intrique. Trained in both electrical engineering and political science, he spent the war, and the Korean War, as an Army Signal Corps officer responsible for very high frequency radio relay systems, advanced technology at that time. Later, he was a staff editor on Business Week and then a communications executive at IBM eventually becoming corporate director of communications. His knowledge of Great Britain first came through countless visits to that country while with IBM. He now lives there part of each year. He has kept abreast of the principal historical accounts of World War II, in particular those which center on the resistance movement. When he is not reading and writing in his present home in North Florida, he struggles to keep his golf handicap down and, with his wife, to cook, travel, and eat well.