Death Is My Job tells the story of Rudolf Lang, novelistic alter ego of Rudolf Höss, commander of Auschwitz and in charge of fine-tuning the ominous machinery of death that would end the lives of millions of Jews. Robert Merle traces, step by step, the intricate path that will lead Lang from a childhood marked by a very strict Catholic father who wanted to make him a priest, to the highest positions within the SS and the very top of the horror, going through the First World War, the Freikorps, prison, the hard years of hunger, unemployment and hardship that the Treaty of Versailles brought to Germany, and his affiliation with the National Socialist Party. When Himmler personally entrusts him with the conception of a death industry that will make what the Nazis considered their "historical enemy" disappear, for Lang such an abominable mission will be reduced to a series of technical problems that must be solved in the most efficient way. Written in a sober style and all the more disturbing for the coldness and restraint with which it avoids any aestheticization or exhibitionism of Evil, and for preferring to delve into the psychological abysses of its protagonists, Death is my trade, published in 1952, is quite a narrative tour de force, one of the first novels that had the audacity to get into the skin and mind of the Nazi executioners. These pages reveal to us the monstrosities that can be committed by someone who, far from being a madman or a sadist, "limits himself" to fulfilling, coldly and dispassionately, his duty.

"Robert Merle is one of the few French writers who have achieved both commercial success and critical admiration" Le Figaro