The Occupation

A riveting novel of intrigue and deception

Guy Walters is the author of two history books on the Second World War, Hunting Evil and Berlin Games. He is also the author of four thrillers set in the same period: The Leader, The Traitor, The Occupation and The Colditz Legacy. A former Times journalist he writes widely on historical topics for the national press. He lives in Wiltshire  with his wife, the author Annabel Venning, and their two children.

February 1945. In his bunker in Berlin, Hitler makes a desperate decision. He will deploy the V3 - a weapon so secret that its lethal nature is unclear even to the slave labourers constructing it deep beneath the Channel Island of Alderney. 
 
June 1990. Workmen on Alderney mysteriously start to fall sick. Journalist Robert Lebonneur believes he knows why. But the closer he gets to the truth, the more he realises he is up against the same deadly forces that caused so much upheaval nearly half a century ago...

The Traitor

It is 1943. British SOE agent Captain John Lockhart is in Crete, fighting with the Resistance. Captured by the Germans, Lockhart faces a stark choice, between death and betrayal of his country. Concealing his true motives, Lockhart makes a bargain: in return for the life of his imprisoned wife, he will work with the Germans. When his mission is revealed, Lockhart is stunned. He is to lead a unit of the Waffen SS made up of British fascists and renegades culled from POW camps: the British Free Corps, Lockhart takes command, but he has an audacious plan to free his wife and other innocent victims of the war - whatever the personal cost.

The Colditz Legacy

Guy Walters is the author of two history books on the Second World War, Hunting Evil and Berlin Games. He is also the author of four thrillers set in the same period: The Leader, The Traitor, The Occupation and The Colditz Legacy. A former Times journalist he writes widely on historical topics for the national press. He lives in Wiltshire with his wife, the author Annabel Venning, and their two children.

Germany 1941. Two British officers, Hugh Hartley and Malcolm Royce, achieved what many believed to be impossible. They escaped from Oflag IVC, better known as Colditz Castle. But as they are about to cross the border into Switzerland, and within yards of reaching freedom, Royce is shot. He begs Hartley to go on and save himself. Wracked with guilt, Hartley leaves his friend behind. 
 
London, 1973. Thirty years later and Hartley is now a senior MI6 officer. When a shadowy contact tips him off that Royce may still be alive, and still being held in Colditz - now a lunatic asylum - Hartley is desperate to discover what really happened to his friend. He plans a perilous mission to break back into Colditz, but the truth he will find there will be more shocking than he could possibly have imagined.

The Leader

A pulse-pounding what-if Second World War thriller of a Britain ruled by a Nazi government

Great Britain, 1937: 
Edward VIII will not abdicate. He and his new bride, Wallis Simpson, are preparing for their coronation. 
 
Winston Churchill is a prisoner on the Isle of Man. 
 
The Prime Minister, Oswald Mosley consults the new Chancellor of Germany, and his close ally, Adolf Hitler on a more 'permanent' solution to the 'Jewish problem'. 
 
The secret police have Britain in an iron grip. 
 
But one man, James Armstrong , a hero of the Great War, is organising the resistance against the government . While 'the leader' is determined to see him hang, Armstrong, constantly on the run, is every bit as clever and resolute as his enemy. 
 
In the tradition of Robert Harris's Fatherland, Guy Walters has writen a compelling, page-turning what-if thriller that imagines a nightmare vision of a Britain that could have been, if history had gone the other way.

Hunting Evil

The dramatic true story of the hunt to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, written with the pace of a real-life thriller

It is gripping and well documented, and deserves a lasting place among histories of the war.

The stuff of thrillers ... An enthralling book and a sobering one.

Absorbing and thoroughly gripping . . . Walters proves emphatically that the reality of Nazi hunting is far more fascinating than the myth.

Hunting Evil is a model of meticulous, courageous and pathbreaking scholarship

Compelling and thoroughly researched . . . a timely reminder of the many skeletons in Europe's cupboard

Guy Walters is the author of six books on the Second World War, including Berlin Games. A former journalist on The Times he writes widely on historical topics for the national press. He lives in Wiltshire with his wife the author Annabel Venning and their two children.

At the end of the Second World War some of the highest ranking members of the Nazi party escaped from justice. Some of them are names that have resonated deeply in twentieth-century history - Eichmann, Mengele, Martin Bormann and Klaus Barbie - not just for the monstrosity of their crimes, but also because of the shadowy nature of their post-war existence, holed up in the depths of Latin America, always one step ahead of their pursuers. 
 
The nature of their escape was as gripping as any good thriller. They were aided and abetted by corrupt Catholic priests in the Vatican, they travelled down secret 'rat lines', hid in foreboding castles high in the Austrian alps, and were taken in by shady Argentine secret agents. The attempts to bring them to justice are no less dramatic, with vengeful Holocaust survivors, inept politicians, and daring plots to kidnap or assassinate the fugitives. 
 
Guy Walters has travelled the world in pursuit of the real account of how the Nazis escaped at the end of the war, the attempts, sometimes successful, to bring them to justice, and what really happened to those that got away. He has interviewed Nazi hunters, former members of Mossad, and poured through archives across the globe to bring this remarkable period of our recent history to dramatic and vivid life.

The Second World War Told by Those Who Fought It

The Voice of War

Sold 10,000 hardback copies in the first month of publication.

James Owen was latterly acting editor of The Daily Telegraph Obituaries page and now writes regularly for the Financial Times and Conde Naste Traveller. He is also contributing editor to The New Dictionary of National Biography. He is presently working on his first book, a study of colonial life during WWII. 
A former journalist on The Times, Guy Walters is the author of The Traitor, a thriller set during the Second World War which was published in 2002. His second book The Leader was published in Spring 2004.

The Second World War was the first truly global conflict and sixty years on its consequences continue to shape the modern world. Season by season The Voice of War charts the course of the central event of the twentieth century using the diaries, letters and memoirs of those who were there, from Russian women fighter pilots to the prisoners of the Japanese to Londoners enduring the Blitz. Their first-hand accounts place us on the ramparts of Colditz, in the hiding places of the Warsaw Ghetto, aboard a dive bomber at Pearl Harbor, with Rommel in the desert and by Churchill's side in Downing Street. Unrivalled in the immediacy, range and power of the experiences it contains, it includes writing by, among others, Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini, Christabel Bielenberg, Noel Coward, Robert Capa, Airey Neave, George Patton, Hermione Ranfurly, Arthur Koestler, James Lees-Milne, Martha Gellhorn, Sophia Loren and Primo Levi. Ambitious, instructive and entertaining, this is the definitive portrait of a world at war.

Guy Walters

Guy Walters strips away the myths to reveal the real story behind the film and finds the truth to be no less thrilling. This is utterly compelling and once again shows there is no better investigator in this field.

In early 1942 the Germans opened a top-security prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Poland for captured Allied airmen. Called Stalag Luft III, the camp soon came to contain some of the most inventive escapers ever known. They were led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, code-named 'Big X', who masterminded an attempt to smuggle hundreds of POWs down a tunnel built right under the noses of their guards. 
 
The escape would come to be immortalised in the famous film The Great Escape, in which the ingenuity and bravery of the men was rightly celebrated. The plan involved multiple tunnels, hundreds of forged documents, as well as specially made German uniforms and civilian clothing. In this book Guy Walters takes a fresh look at this remarkable event and asks the question, what was the true story, not the movie version? He also examines what the escape really achieved, and the nature of the man who led it. 
 
The Real Great Escape is the first account to draw on a newly-released cache of documents from Roger Bushell’s family, including letters from Bushell, that reveals much about this remarkable man, his life and experiences during the war, and the planning of the escape attempt that was to make him famous. The result is a compelling and authoritative re-evaluation of the most iconic escape story of the Second World War.

Guy Walters

Praise for The Real Great Escape

Guy Walters strips away the myths to reveal the real story behind the film and finds the truth to be no less thrilling. This is utterly compelling and once again shows there is no better investigator in this field.

Books by Guy Walters

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