Littell's novel
The Kindly Ones was written in French and was published in France in 2006. The novel is the story of World War II and the
Eastern Front, through the fictional memories of an articulate
SS officer named Maximilien Aue. Littell said he was inspired to write the novel after seeing a photograph of
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a
Soviet partisan executed by the
Wehrmacht. He traces the original inspiration for the book from seeing
Claude Lanzmann’s film
Shoah, an acclaimed documentary about
the Holocaust, in 1991. He began research for the book in 2001 and started the first draft eighteen months later, after he had read around two hundred books about the
Third Reich and the Eastern Front, as well as visiting Germany, East Europe and Caucasus. Littell claims that he undertook the creation of his main character, Aue, by imagining what he himself would have done had he been born in pre-war Germany and had become a
National Socialist. tells the story of Lynx, a "half-breed" who lives in a futuristic
Paris. Many scenes in the novel take place in the
Paris Catacombs; he also includes an unusual appendix in this novel which lists all the music and songs he listened to while composing. In addition, Littell has published a detailed intelligence report about the security organs of the
Russian Federation, an analysis of
Léon Degrelle's book
La Campagne de Russie, influenced by the works of the sociologist
Klaus Theweleit, one book with four texts written before
The Kindly Ones and, finally, a short essay. Following
The Kindly Ones, Littell directed a documentary titled
Wrong Elements, in which he interviews the former child soldiers of
Joseph Kony. The film was screened out of competition at the
2016 Cannes Film Festival. ==Awards==