His Watchful Eye by Jack Cavanaugh
**Overview of *His Watchful Eye* by Jack Cavanaugh**
*His Watchful Eye* is a historical fiction novel set during World War II, following the harrowing experiences of Konrad Reichmann, a sniper assigned to a Nazi SS battalion on the Eastern Front. As Konrad and his partner, Neff Kessel, carry out their orders to eliminate Russian military targets, they are increasingly disturbed by the brutality inflicted on civilians by their commander, Gunther Kral. The story takes a dramatic turn when Neff, who has developed feelings for a Russian peasant girl, challenges Kral's violent tactics and is murdered. This tragedy propels Konrad into a moral crisis, leading him to desert the army and seek a path that aligns with his spiritual beliefs.
Returning to Berlin, Konrad reunites with his mentor, Pastor Josef Schumacher, who is secretly rescuing disabled children from the Nazis. The narrative explores themes of courage, faith, and personal sacrifice as Konrad grapples with his mission to combat evil while remaining true to his beliefs. Alongside him, Ernst Ehrenberg, another former Hitler Youth, faces his own moral dilemmas as he attempts to help a French prisoner of war. Through its depiction of complex characters and their struggles against a backdrop of war, *His Watchful Eye* addresses profound questions of morality, loyalty, and the influence of faith in times of crisis. The novel culminates in a reflection on divine oversight and the transformative power of choosing righteousness in a world rife with evil.
His Watchful Eye by Jack Cavanaugh
First published: Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2002
Genre(s): Novel
Subgenre(s): Historical fiction (twentieth century); thriller/suspense
Core issue(s): Coming of age or teen life; courage; faith; freedom and free will; martyrdom; persecution; responsibility; sacrifice; self-abandonment; social action; trust in God
Principal characters
Pastor Josef Schumacher , a Christian pastor of a German home churchMady Schumacher , Pastor Schumacher’s wifeKonrad Reichmann , a former Hitler Youth member and a second lieutenant in the German armyNeff Kessel , Konrad’s boyhood friend and partner in a sniper teamLisette , a former Hitler Youth member, now a ChristianGunther Kral , a captain in the German armyErnst Ehrenberg , also known asPerigrine , a scientist and an officer in the German army
Christian Themes
Konrad Reichmann and Neff Kessel form a well-trained sniper team assigned to a Nazi Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS) battalion on the Russian front during World War II. Their assignment is to eliminate selected Russian military officers as the German army is being forced to retreat from the eastern front. Konrad and Neff perform their assigned tasks flawlessly, but they are horrified by the brutality with which their SS commander, Gunther Kral, terrorizes the Russian civilian population during the retreat. Neff, who has fallen in love with a Russian peasant girl, is overcome by the carnage that is heaped upon a peasant village. He challenges his commander’s tactics, and he is murdered by the very hand of his own commander, Kral. Witnessing the murder of his best friend and partner, Konrad is pushed over the edge of moral nausea, deserts from the army, and hatches a plan to use his training as a sniper to change the course of German political power single-handedly.
Konrad decides to return to the outskirts of Berlin, where he was reared, and looks up his spiritual mentor, Pastor Josef Schumacher, who has gone underground as a rescuer of disabled children—castoffs from the “master” race. Konrad encounters several of his old friends from the Hitler Youth movement; among them is Lisette, a young woman for whom Konrad has always had strong romantic feelings. She is working with Pastor Schumacher and his wife, Mady, caring for the children. Lisette also works in a Berlin office to earn desperately needed financial support for the ministry. Konrad uses the home of Pastor Schumacher as a base of operations from which to plan and execute his plot to change the course of German history. He is surprised, however, by the power of the spiritual influence exerted upon him by Schumacher, and his plot is altered in the extreme. Konrad now must find a way to try to carry out his self-ordained mission while at the same time maintaining his spiritual integrity and protecting the people he loves.
Ernst Ehrenberg, another former Hitler Youth friend of Konrad and Lisette, also finds himself in a moral dilemma when he falls in love with a French prisoner of war who is being used as a “secretary” for an unscrupulous SS colonel at the scientific installation where Ernst is stationed. Discovering that this woman is married to another prisoner of war, he redirects his energy to become a surreptitious liaison between the couple, risking his career and his life in a heroic effort to save the life of the woman’s husband. In the process he is reunited with Konrad in a riveting turn of events.
At this point, the characters are caught up in currents that they neither planned nor are able to control. They can only live moment by moment as they are led by their faith and their models, Pastor Josef and Mady Schumacher.
Christian Themes
The sequel to While Mortals Sleep, Cavanaugh’s first novel in the Songs of the Night series and winner of the 2002 Christy Award in the international historical category, His Watchful Eye also won a Christy Award, in the same category, for 2003. The plot captures life in war-torn Europe without romanticizing the religiosity of the theological content or compromising the realism of the characters. This is the tale of a very real group of young people who grow up in a world exploding with physical as well as moral destruction. It is a story of heroic acts, and it is also a story of tragic failure. In the same group of people, taught by the same mentor, some are true to their master and some fall prey to the lure of the dark side. It is a story of people who not only are willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice for what they believe but actually do pay this price. It is also a story of those who persevere to the end and overcome evil. Most of all, His Watchful Eye tells the story of how God truly watches over those he has chosen and how his true servants give up their lives as his to use as he sees fit.
Konrad’s character places before the reader a study in human transformation. He is a man of virtue seeking to overcome evil on the natural plane, but he encounters the Spirit of God and must decide whether to fight for the right in his own way or in God’s way. He is faced with the choice of doing something good that he knows he himself has the power to do, or to become the instrument of a higher power. This is the central moral dilemma of the novel—not whether to succumb to the evils of Nazism, but which road to take in fighting those evils. Cavanaugh could have constructed the events in such a way that Konrad would not have been forced to make such a decision; instead, Konrad must face himself and God in the process. Clearly, Konrad embodies the spirit of a fellow German Christian patriot, the Christian pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned by the Nazis. Like Bonhoeffer, Konrad ends by serving God.
Pastor Josef Schumacher is just as strongly drawn as the model of the Christian serving God: He serves his “church,” the children and the former Hitler Youth, as their spiritual guide. After thwarting the inhuman efforts of an evil political regime by literally kidnapping disabled children from a “mental institution” where they were destined to be guinea pigs for human experimentation, Schumacher devotes his life to the daily welfare and safety of these children, virtually under the nose of the Nazi government. A stalwart of perseverance, Pastor Schumacher suffers the physical and psychological effects of his Christian civil disobedience to the very end. His life is rewarded by the legacies of the lives of Mady, his wife, and Lisette and the other former Hitler Youth, who take up his mantle of ministry after he is gone.
Sources for Further Study
Cavanaugh, Jack. While Mortals Sleep. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2001. The first in the Songs of the Night series and winner of the 2002 Christy Award in the international historical category, also featuring Pastor Josef Schumacher.
Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Translated by Oliver Pretzel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Written by a respected historian, this account combines Haffner’s analytical perspective with the emotion of an eyewitness to Nazi atrocities, presenting a view of pre-World War II Germany that few Americans ever see.
Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Documents, from firsthand accounts, the activity, development, and impact of the Hitler-Junge (Hitler Youth) movement: the secular combination of Sunday School and a paramilitary club for German children in a well-designed effort by the Nazis to condition children for the purposes of the state. The book delves into the history of the activity of the Hitler Youth as well as the psychological bases for the group’s methodology.
Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945. Translated by Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1999. The firsthand account of a German Jew who survived much of the persecution of his fellows because he was married to an “Aryan” woman. Klemperer’s account details the gradual descent into racial depravity experienced by the ordinary German population during the Nazi years.
Ross, Robert W. So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. A chronicle of the activity of the American Protestant press as it relates to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, this book is well researched and contains surprising insights. For example, commenting on the accuracy with which the American Protestant press reported on the Jewish Holocaust, Ross notes that “virtually no detail discovered in 1945 had not been already reported in the American Protestant press by 1943, with the one exception of the total number of death camps, and perhaps the more refined methods used in the death camps, such as the crematoria and the brutality of the SS guards and the Kapo system.”