CATALYST FOR VENGEANCE

Beginning in the 1930s, this is the story of August Leichweiss, a product of family and social breakdown in between-the-wars Germany. His family, beset by war injuries, poverty and anti-Semitism breaks up in abandonment by his mother and suicide of his father. Thrown onto Munich’s streets he joins the Hitler Youth and later the army. By now an ardent Nazi, he is wounded in France but recovers and rejoins Erwin Rommel in the Afrika Korps. Captured, he is transported to a prisoner of war camp in Braggs, Oklahoma where he continues to nurse his animosity toward the United States. When it had become obvious that America might be drawn into the war, Admiral Canaris, head of German intelligence, realized that in an extended war, America’s materials and manufacturing superiority would overwhelm Germany. His only hope was to keep Germany alive until the Allies would be willing to accept a negotiated peace. To that end, he began to search for the most important, most vulnerable, weakest link in the American war production machine. An American scientist with emotional ties to Germany had developed a catalyst used in transforming crude oil into aviation gasoline. This catalyst, if successful, would allow the production of enough fuel to sustain the air raids that would cripple German manufacturing and demoralize its population. The scientist had managed to embed a flaw into the catalyst which had initially limited its effectiveness. A brilliant chemist had uncovered this flaw and was preparing a “fix” when Canaris realized this was the weak link for which he was looking. Through his spy networks, Canaris contacted Leichweiss (whose hatred had become obsessive) and recruited him to break out of prison and sabotage the mine where a crucial mineral was being produced. How the plan was thwarted by an alert farmer and how Leichweiss survived to continue his crazed vendetta against America makes the rest of the story.