The book is a fictional autobiography, describing the life of Maximilien Aue, a former officer in the SS who, decades later, tells the story of a crucial part of his life when he was an active member of the security forces of the Third Reich. Aue starts the war as a member of an Einsatzgruppe, before being sent to the doomed German forces locked in the Battle of Stalingrad, but survives. After a convalescence period in Berlin and a visit to France, he is designated for a managerial role for the concentration camps and visits extermination camps. He is present during the Battle of Berlin, Nazi regime's last stand. By the end of the story, he leaves Germany unscathed to start a new life in northern France. Throughout the book Aue meets several famous Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler. In the book, Aue accepts responsibility for his actions, but most of the time he feels more like an observer than a direct participant.
The book is divided into seven chapters, each named after a baroque dance, following the sequence of a Bach Suite. The narrative of each chapter is influenced by the rhythm of each dance.
« Toccata »: In this introduction, we are introduced to the narrator and discover how he has ended up in France after the war. He is the director of a lace factory, has a wife, children, and grandchildren, though he has no real affection for his family and continues his homosexual encounters when he travels on business. He hints of an incestuous love, which we learn later was for his twin sister. He explains that he has decided to write about his experiences during the war for his own benefit and not as an attempt to justify himself. He closes the introduction by saying, "I live, I do what can be done, it's the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!"
« Allemande I & II »: Aue describes his service as an officer in one of the Einsatzgruppen extermination squads operating in Ukraine and the Crimea, as well as in the Caucasus (a major theme is the racial classification, and thus fate, of the region's Mountain Jews). Aue's group is attached to the 6th Army in Ukraine, where he witnesses the Lviv pogroms and participates in the enormous massacre at Babi Yar. He describes in detail the killing of Soviet Jews, Communists, alleged partisans and other victims. Although he seems to become increasingly indifferent to the atrocities he is witnessing and sometimes taking part in, he begins to experience daily bouts of vomiting and suffers a mental breakdown. After taking sick leave, he returns to his unit to discover that a hostile superior officer has arranged that he be transferred to the front line at Stalingrad in the fall of 1942.
« Courante »: Aue thus takes part in the final weeks of the battle for Stalingrad. As with the massacres, he is mostly an observer; the narrator rather than the combatant. In the midst of the chaos, violence, and starvation, he manages to have a discussion with a captured Soviet political commissar about the similarities between the Nazi and the Bolshevik world views, and once again is able to indicate his intellectual support for Nazi ideas. Aue gets shot in the head and seriously wounded, but is miraculously evacuated just before the German surrender in February 1943.
« Sarabande »: Convalescing in Berlin, Aue is awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, by the SS chief Heinrich Himmler himself, for his duty at Stalingrad. While still on sick leave, he decides to visit his mother and stepfather in Antibes, in Italian-occupied France. Apparently, while he is in a deep sleep, his mother and stepfather are brutally murdered. Max flees from the house without notifying anybody and returns to Berlin.
« Menuet en rondeaux »: Aue is transferred to the Ministry of the Interior, headed by Himmler, where he plays a managerial role for the concentration camps. He struggles to improve the living conditions of those prisoners selected to work in the factories as slave laborers, in order to improve their productivity. Aue meets Nazi bureaucrats organizing the implentation of the Final Solution (i.e., Eichmann and Rudolf Höß) and is given a glimpse of extermination camps (i.e., Auschwitz and Belzec); he also spends some time in Budapest, just when preparations are being made for transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Aue witnesses the tug-of-war between those who are concerned with war production (Albert Speer) and those who are doggedly trying to implement the Final Solution. It is during this period that two police detectives from the Kripo, who are investigating the murders of his mother and stepfather, begin to visit him regularly. Like the Furies, they hound and torment him with their questions, which indicate their suspicions about his role in the crime.
« Air »: Max visits his sister and brother-in-law's empty house in Pomerania. There, he engages in a veritable autoerotic orgy particularly fueled by fantasy images of his twin sister. The two police officers follow his trail to the house, but he manages to hide from them.
« Gigue »: Accompanied by his friend Thomas, who has come to rescue him, as well as a band of fanatical and half-feral German orphans, Max makes his way back through the Red Army occupied territory and across the front lines. In Berlin, Max and Thomas find many of their colleagues preparing for escape in the chaos of the last days of the Third Reich; Thomas' own plan is to impersonate a French laborer. Aue meets and is personally decorated by Hitler in the Führerbunker. During the decoration ceremony, Aue inexplicably bites the Führer's nose, yet manages to escape, fleeing through the Berlin U-Bahn subway tunnels, only to encounter his police pursuers again. Though their case has been repeatedly thrown out of court, they're unwilling to accept defeat and prepare to execute him. Barely escaping their clutches when the Soviets storm the tunnels and kill one of the policemen, Aue wanders aimlessly for a while in the streets of war-torn Berlin before deciding to make a break for it. Making his way through the destroyed Berlin Zoo, he is yet again faced by the surviving policeman. Thomas shows up to kill the last policeman, only to himself be killed by Aue, who steals from him the papers and uniform of a French STO conscripted worker.
The readers know from the beginning of the book that Aue's multilingualism will allow him to escape back to France with a new identity as a returning Frenchman. In the last paragraph of the novel, the narrator, after he relentlessly killed his friend and protector, suddenly finds himself "alone with time and sadness": "The Kindly Ones were on to me." But in the end, all is not explicitly laid out for the reader; for Littell, in the words of one reviewer, "excels in the unsaid."