This is neo-Nazi propaganda at its most juvenile.

17-year-old Hans Hepner of the Panzergrenadier Division "Großdeutschland" escapes certain death in an unidentified battle in the Belgorod Oblast some time in 1943, emerging in a medieval-fantasy world of anthropomorphic animals. After being rescued by a pair of travelers who swiftly claim his virginity, he sets out in search of a German fighter in a cross-country trek that climaxes in a battle for the fate of the continent.

That's the premise. The true core of the story focuses on whitewashing the Waffen-SS through parallel plots following the real-life war criminals Josef "Sepp" Dietrich and Joachim (Jochen) Peiper, who are pinched from our timeline further in. It is a bizarre blend of lazy fantasy worldbuilding and atrocious historical revisionism endearing only to the lowest common denominator of Furry enthusiast with a penchant for Nazi apologism, gratuitous sex, and teenage wish fulfillment wrapped in thoroughly amateur prose.

The novel follows three principal storylines: Hans' journey, Dietrich's consolidation of the wolf packs into his private army to fend off an orcish invasion and claim the region for himself, and selected highlights of Peiper's activities on the Eastern Front before his battle group is brought to the fantasy world in time to join the final fight. Side plots serve as exposition for the invasion, focusing on Kasha, a wolf who eventually joins Dietrich after his homeland is overrun; Asril, a transient housecat who joins a rag-tag group of refugees fleeing the invasion; and Hex, a noble scion from the "Peninsula of Kitsunes" who inexplicably carries a German-made pistol and abandons Asril's group during a bandit ambush for a short subplot of his own.

Objectively speaking, this is just badly written. The author's prose is simple, yet prone to redundant and unclear wording, and more than once I struggled to understand the basic sequence of events. Even for paperback pulp, 71 chapters over 413 pages betrays poor organization: they are consistently short (averaging 3–5 pages apiece), paced arbitrarily, and sometimes break even in the middle of the same scene—the shortest totals three paragraphs on a single page, not counting the after-credits-stinger epilogue. The author's syntax is riddled with errors that would never have made it past a professional editor: basic homophones are confused (aught for ought, reigns for reins, etc.), virtually every line of dialogue receives a paragraph break that muddies who's actually speaking, and despite the frequent use of German words for flavour, the grammar is almost never correct ('kamerads' rather than 'kameraden'). Two chapters are even placed in reverse order. While Kasha becomes one of far too many side characters after joining Dietrich, Asril's and Hex's stories never intersect with the Germans', serving as little more than filler whose information could have easily been gleaned during Hans' wandering; instead, it's not until the rally around Dietrich that the Germans have any understanding of the stakes—and even then they're not properly briefed before battle is joined.

Physical descriptions, when given, are bare-bones at best and delivered nonsensically late to when they should be most relevant: one of the first two "furres" Hans meets is a "deercat", introduced to the reader before they cross paths, yet her appearance is only elaborated two chapters later when she joins in his First Time; "wolftaurs" encountered early in the story are only finally given tangible form towards the very end, and rather than the centaur-like design typical of the Furry fandom, they are overgrown wild wolves with six legs. If the author was taking well-known furry archetypes for granted, it would merely be lazy writing; neglecting to explain a novel species to the reader is a fundamental dereliction of narrative duty.

The setting itself is similarly phoned-in. As with far too many fantasy stories, different species are used for ersatz real-world cultures: faux-Ottoman meerkats complete with harem and onion turbans, jet-black jackals of faux-classical Egypt, a wuxia Monkey Kingdom, and the quintessential "noble savage" wolven nomads. As for the Orcish "Khanate"... we'll get to that later. Virtually no society is explored in any depth, with only vague descriptions of its architectural style, and the author relies on the reader's familiarity with animal archetypes to skip detailed descriptions, leading to incongruities in characters' point of view: Hans does not know what a jackal is, yet mistakes meerkats for prairie dogs, a New World species that would theoretically be even less recognizable to an average mid-century European. Every settlement appears to be its own city-state (not that politics are ever explained) and their geography is conveyed only through cardinal directions from wherever the characters are at a given moment, making plotting distance and destinations guesswork left to the reader.

Characters receive next-to-no distinguishing personality: Hans, the ostensible audience surrogate, is a painfully vanilla self-insert who can barely articulate his blind patriotism, let alone his goals or interests. Peiper's actual SS psychological evaluation as a cold and arrogant narcissist is replaced with a generic strict-father upbringing played for sympathy. Dietrich's portrayal conflates brutality with strategic genius while forgetting to showcase the actual strategy. The furry characters have even less dimension: Asril is a compulsive thief, Kasha is a Proud Warrior, Hex looks out for Number 1, and none grow beyond that. This is problematic because, even setting aside the novel's political agenda, the lack of emotional depth undermines all attempts to foster reader empathy: Hans pivots from a paint-by-numbers 'War is Hell' spiel to a Cowboys-and-Indians (or rather, Germans and Russkies) crowd-pleaser on a dime; one of Asril's traveling companions falls ill and dies within the space of a single chapter, but the lack of rapport between the characters, and the scene's utter inconsequence to the rest of the story, reduce it to one of many cheap fire-and-forget moments of emotional chain-yanking. The book is classified here as a romance; for reasons I will explain later, this is an absolute joke.

Suffice to say, the story has pacing problems. Besides attempting to juggle between four and five simultaneous plotlines (with no synchronicity to their respective tones, occasionally leading to mood whiplash between chapters), the time scale is totally arbitrary: Hans spends about a chapter apiece in each location he visits, with only a vague allusion to months passing with the onset of winter when he reaches the north. The refugees are simultaneously barely a step ahead of the invasion yet in no particular rush, while their geographic divorce from the German characters works to further obfuscate the scope and scale of the orcs' advance. Nor is there any logical relationship between time in the two worlds: Dietrich and Peiper are spirited out years apart, yet arrive roughly contemporaneously in the Furry universe—in fact, Hans meets an American from 2009 who arrived before he did. Hard dates are almost never given: Dietrich is apparently pinched circa the Ardennes offensive in 1944, but the chapter placement suggests it was during Peiper's debriefing back in '43. Nowhere does this slipshod timekeeping weaken the story more than the battles: even when depicting historical engagements, the date and environment are vague, and description of the action is attention-deficit, detailing a fight blow-by-blow one moment and glossing over front-wide action the next. This combined with the author's allergy to describing any setting in depth turns what should be the highlight of a war story into a disorienting mess—and not the sort intended as a commentary on combat itself.

I critique this all so thoroughly to leave no doubt that this is a bad book, and anyone that claims otherwise either hasn't set their standards higher than amateur fanfiction, or is fronting for ulterior motives. Now we move to the crux of this review: the author's fascist agenda.

An Internet search for "Len Gilbert Furred Reich" produces two strands of results: those relating to the book itself, and news articles on the Furry fandom's own Alt-Right infestation. Gilbert, real name Casey Hoerth, was a state-level campaign organizer for the Trump ticket in the 2016 American presidential election and lead administrator of the "Alt-Furry" Discord chat server, wherein he attempted to organize for the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. On the original "Furred Reich Blog" he implored "Nazi Furs", a sub-fandom originally catering to cosplay rather than actual politics, to "stop apologizing" (i.e. disclaim they hold no sympathy for Nazi Germany or its ideals), presupposing a Furry exemption from the Nazi persecution of 'social degeneracy' while doubling down on slandering leftists, progressives, and the LGBTQ+ community specifically. (Ironically, these pieces did not carry over when he rebooted the "Len Gilbert Blog" in 2017 shortly after this book was re-released under the title Out of The Ruins.)

Despite this, he claimed in mainstream interviews that neither he nor the Alt-Furry are neo-Nazis. But the book speaks for itself.

The opening chapter is barely three sentences in before Soviet stereotypes begin. Like virtually all units on the Eastern Front, "Großdeutschland" actively perpetrated war crimes, yet here the Germans are shocked and remorseful for 'accidentally' grenading a civilian residence while condemning their enemy for failing to evacuate. Soviet soldiers counterattack in "hordes" so ragged some are missing uniforms. Hans is implied to be shooting retreating unarmed soldiers, and the text bends over backwards to pre-emptively paint him as the maligned party. His crisis of faith teased in the abstract on commercial book sites occurs less than a quarter-ways in when the conveniently sympathetic American video gamer delivers the double-whammy that not only do the Nazis lose the war, they don't even outlast the Soviets: what was it all for, laments Hans, if he wasn't even part of the killing stroke against Bolshevism? (He proceeds to shrug his proverbial shoulders and never interrogates his presumed raison d'être again.)

Peiper's chapters are even worse. In a melodramatic speech before launching the historical rescue action of the 320th Infantry Division during the Third Battle of Kharkov, he claims Germany is fighting to purify a 'united Europe' of degeneracy while pooh-poohing Allied motivations, trying to equivocate the inevitable barbarism of warfare with the genocidal ideology that underwrote the Waffen-SS and all its actions, far-too-presciently lamenting the 'victors' justice' that awaited their just-following-orders excuses. Yet in a brazen act of cognitive dissonance, the author actually depicts, with sadistic pleasure, the massacre of Krasnaya Polyana—not, of course, as the wholesale murder of unarmed civilians, but a 'defensive' action that nonetheless ends with the SS gunning down a battalion's worth of surrendering soldiers. The chapter itself is titled "Blowtorch", a direct reference to the nickname Peiper's battalion earned for its specialty for such atrocities.

I have read stories that emphasize the moral abyss of war, and I have read stories built around villain protagonists. The Furred Reich fails at both: one simply cannot reconcile Krasnaya Polyana with the story's backbreaking bid to cast Peiper as a paragon leader. Yet this doublethink persists, often comically self-unaware, throughout the story: only moments after playing up Peiper's dashing looks, the text smears the 320th's commanding general Georg-Wilhelm Postel for keeping a clean uniform, denigrating him as a bumbling buffoon who "must never get in the SS." A passing remark implies Erwin Rommel attempted to recruit Dietrich into the 20 July Plot (an incredible counterfactual given the coup intended to scapegoat the SS), despite evidence of Rommel's involvement being spurious at best and his actual knowledge of the conspiracy surface-level at most—throwing popular culture's most iconic poster boy of Wehrmacht apologism under the bus is certainly an unusual choice, but fits with the author's devotion to the SS as Hitler's True Believers. This blind adulation of the men in black reaches apotheosis in Dietrich's plot: the original commander of Hitler's bodyguard, barely introduced as personally choosing Peiper for Kharkov, finds himself marooned in the new world and through nothing more than the novelty of his pistol convinces the wolf tribes to submit to him, crafting them into an elite dare-to-die corps complete with lightning rune tattoos; quite the redemption for a Party toady who couldn't even read a military map.

It's worth pointing out how incongruous Dietrich's "Lightning Rune Tribe" reads within the setting's own lore: humans in the Furry world are implied to be society's bottom rung, with Kasha's former pack leader hinting that unified settlements serve as tributaries to the wolves. As with many armchair zoologists, the author bases wolven kinship on the discredited theory of the 'alpha male', and even after Dietrich is randomly bestowed Werner Pötschke as adjutant, it's hard to believe two men wielding guns are enough to prevent the archetypal leadership challenge virtually expected of this genre, especially when the Alpha trope and Nazi ideology fetishize gymnastic strength. But, in a world where the strong lead the weak, the SS must be strongest, no matter how illogical.

Take, for instance, the glaring oversight in the story's basic premise: virtually every recurring German character other than Hans is not simply Waffen-SS, but the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler—the official bodyguard, the fanatics to which all others aspired. The Schutzstaffel enforced Nazi racial policy both at home and abroad; it engineered the Holocaust; it condemned Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other cultures as 'sub-humans' to be ruthlessly and wholly exterminated; it micromanaged marriages to ensure an optimal blood quantum within its membership. Setting aside the reality of mass rape, one of the most ubiquitous war crimes of human history, try to imagine Sepp Dietrich explaining to Heinrich Himmler why instead of breeding pure Aryan stock he's sleeping with a pair of wolf sisters. It is not one of the book's actual sex scenes, but it is heavily implied.

In fact, it's worth examining how the book treats women generally, given it touts itself as a 'romance'. Under the misappropriated chapter title "Troika", mere moments after nursing Hans back to health, his rescuers all but jump his virginal bones in the classic male fantasy of an experienced female partner coaching the dilettante (not that there's much coaching as he masters the art of female pleasure on literally his first try); the second scene midway through the book involves a similar hookup with an older woman. Notwithstanding the scenes' mechanical writing and entirely Hans-centric focus, there is no chemistry to either: he knows nothing about his partners other than their names, is all too eager to get under their skirts, and while Jan at least admits it was merely an adulterous fling before literally running off, Kairah and Amalijah ditch him in his sleep. It's the familiar frame of woman as the temptress, the harlot, the vehicle for man's pleasure.

On the coin's other face is woman as victim: Asril's journey amounts to a parade of calamity and casual abuse over which she demonstrates no agency; Ani is barely dead and buried before Hex glibly says his had it worse; near the end of her plot, the surviving travelers are saved from lusty bandits by a total Deus ex Machina. Dietrich's wolf sisters all but prostrate themselves like Man Friday after being rescued from an orc despite, as previously mentioned, fealty to a human conflicting with the world's social hierarchy. Man is Protector, and the Germans are such Mary-Sues (there, I said it) that they can even smash through racial and social barriers in pursuit of 'love'—a hilariously subversive implication for an author cheerleading the poster child of racist regimes.

When Hans finally meets Sarah, the snow leopard featured in the cover image, the story is in its final third, and the hookup is so arbitrary it reads as a self-parody: she is so naïve and he is so desperate for a girlfriend that they profess their undying devotion then and there. Naturally, she is so eager to please that she immediately volunteers to hunt for both—and is promptly struck down the next day by two wolves (who by now may be part of Dietrich's pack, a plot hole never addressed), literally muted for the rest of the book while Hans assumes the mantle of breadwinner and proverbial castle guardian, leading to his link-up with Peiper's men. When most people speak of objectification of women in media, few probably expect a romantic coupling to serve as such a trite plot device.

Bridging both sides is one of the book's most disgusting scenes. Kasha's introductory chapter depicts the rape of his sister (name given midway through, as if in afterthought) by an orc marauder. Despite storming into his village gunning for vengeance, Kasha stands by and watches, the scene itself described unnervingly voyeuristically. In a moment that implies some sort of mind control, her resistance breaks and he abandons her, claiming she had "made" her "choice"; she is never mentioned again. Blood, apparently, runs thinner than water in the Furry world: even when rendered utterly powerless, the victim is still somehow at fault.

Beyond the author's misogynistic streak, the text is peppered with scenes that read like bullet points for his political ethos. Asril is such a libertarian she'd rather steal for a living than suffer the indignity of charity. The story see-saws within a single chapter on refugees, disparaging Miao's lax border controls one minute, sympathizing with Asril and Co. the next, before drawing a line between them and the 'bad' refugees, a faceless mass of opportunistic molesters straight out of Trump's campaign overture. Misinterpreting Dietrich's offer of a cigarette, the brave warrior Kasha sputters like a middle-schooler to insist he isn't gay. At almost every opportunity, the democratic ideal is cast as misguided at best, a hypocritical cover at worst. In an especially callous act of celebrity (mis)appropriation, the American character James (speculated to represent James Rolfe, best known for his YouTube personality the 'Angry Video Game Nerd') casually condemns modern-day Zimbabwe, claiming with the benefit of foresight Churchill would have allied with Hitler rather than allow African independence in what I can only assume is the author's shout-out to America's 'Lost Cause' bigots.

With the orcs, the racism shifts from casual to overt, channeling everything too cartoonishly depraved to pin on the Soviet Union itself. A case study in dehumanizing the enemy Other, they are referred to throughout most of the book either as "grimeskins" or literal monsters, waffling between semi-intelligent thugs and sadistic psychopaths gleefully exalting their bloodlust. The title of "Khanate" is a deliberate play to the stereotype of "Asiatic hordes" and echoes a passage in which the Russians are conflated with the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan Temujin (the orcs' leader is simply identified as the Great Orc)—besides implying the Slavic people are 'false' Europeans, 'mongoloid' is still a common slur against perceived mental deficiency, and the chapter title "Rotten Edifice" alludes to Hitler's infamous prediction of an easy Eastern victory. Originally contained in what reads suspiciously like a typo of the Taklamakan Desert (of southwestern Xinjiang Province, home of the Uyghur people, a Muslim minority upon whom the People's Republic of China is currently waging genocide), in yet another barely-explained sequence of events, the orcs eventually stop fighting each other and launch a nondescript war of conquest across the continent. This stereotypical template of barbarian marauders who kill all the men and steal all the women for the propagation of their own species provides an irredeemable villain against whom the author can play out his anti-Soviet revenge fantasy without having to contend with historical accuracy or moral restraint—indeed, even after the story notes the presence of concubines in the orcs' war camp, only a single female survivor emerges after the wolves torch everything, an all-too-fitting echo of the book's opening scene. There is even a mirror Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which, in the story's closest brush with self-awareness, Dietrich only rejects because it would stymie his own expansionist ambitions.

But while the war against the orcs forms the climax of the plot, the story's thematic apex arrives sooner. Beginning with Peiper's postwar arrest in the audaciously-titled chapter "Undefeated", the author flies his true colours from the highest flagpole he can find as he attempts to singlehandedly discredit the 1946 Malmedy massacre trial. In stark contrast to the story's general pattern of vague descriptions and token motivations, the text is suddenly hyper-focused, the four chapters in Dachau the only time I felt the author's emotion laid raw on the page. It is, like everything else, a transparent attempt at revisionist history lionizing the SS; what makes these scenes especially odious is Hoerth's perversion of the historical record.

These are the facts: on December 17, 1944, Peiper's battle group executed 84 American prisoners of war near the Belgian town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. It was neither the first nor last such execution of captured soldiers and civilians Peiper's unit committed during the Ardennes offensive, but Malmedy was the worst massacre by numbers of American personnel in the European theatre: disarmed soldiers were assembled in a field and abruptly machine-gunned, with wounded survivors shot at close range. While Peiper denied the executions were on his orders, he attempted to plea-bargain the pardoning of his unit in exchange for taking responsibility for chain of command, which was rejected by the prosecution. Peiper's original sentence was death by hanging, but this was commuted to life imprisonment after a procedural review confirmed allegations of misconduct during pretrial interrogations, although it upheld the original charges.

Everything else is the author twisting uncertainties and advancing outright lies. The gloves come off as, in the tellingly-titled chapter "Pearls and Swine", the text smears the lead interrogator, Prague-born Zionist William R. Perl, as an unshaven, ill-fitted, sneering cartoon—the sort of caricature Goebbels himself would have used in anti-Semitic propaganda. Peiper describes his defence counsel's translator simply as "Jewish-looking". The scenes play up the lie that defendants made false confessions under torture, with Peiper likening a blackout hood to Ku Klux Klan dress. Select excerpts of the trial transcripts are spun into a melodrama befitting a period Hollywood film, pitting the prosecutor, an over-acted Burton Ellis, against the desperate defence counsel Willis Everett Jr., depicted as the underdog trying to salvage justice from a kangaroo court. Incredibly, Peiper is not even fully-aware of the circumstances of the massacre until a casual chat with his bunkmate shortly before the trial—historically, most of the defendants fingered Pötschke, who had conveniently died in Operation Spring Awakening; like so many of the story's dangling threads, this is never revisited even after Peiper's survivors join with Dietrich's wolves. Indeed, it is especially significant that Dietrich disappears from our world during the war and never stands trial: his historical testimony confirmed Hitler had ordered the Ardennes offensive to use the same brutality honed on the Eastern Front. Instead, the reader is left only with Peiper's word, and he was notorious for lying about his record—from his Nazi Party membership to his responsibilities as Himmler's adjutant at the beginning of the Holocaust.

Of course, history did not resolve in Peiper's (or the author's) favour. In perhaps the single most farcical scene of the entire book, amidst an attempted prison break mid-trial the defendants are rescued from damnation in what is revealed a divine intervention, 72 prisoners suddenly re-equipped for battle. (Logistics is the story's most gaping plothole: Dietrich's arsenal alone magically expands in each chapter.) The war on the orcs is thus understood as a stage for redemption—not of the Germans' sins, which the author refuses to believe exist, but of the very ethos that impelled them. It is why, at every opportunity, SS war criminals are exalted as paragon warriors. It is why the Wehrmacht is painted as a failure and Rommel a traitor. It is why, among the arbitrary cameos reinforcing Kampfgruppe Peiper is Jack G. "Texas" Wheelis, an American guard historically alleged to have aided in Hermann Göring's prison suicide in what the author believes was an intentional act to undermine the Nuremberg Trials. It is why Peiper's arrival in the Furry world is titled "Destiny". It is not the Nazis who were at fault, claims the book, but the Jews they butchered and the Allies they warred. The Germans were innocent: the 'real' injustice was that they lost. Hitler was right; the world was wrong.

This is how hate speech spreads. The most effective lie cloaks itself in shards of truth: Hoerth seeds just enough historical fact to make his narrative look plausible to the unwary, then spins the ambiguities in his favour. From there, it is easy sell outright lies: that German prisoners of war were subjected to the slave labour and calculated killing-off as the Soviets suffered; that Peiper had no hand in Malmedy et al. when the executions were lauded in official state reports; that the postwar trials were "Jewish revenge" and not an attempt to grapple with a crime of hitherto-unimaginable scope. The story is not about Hans, or orcs, or furries at all: it is, in the spirit of the SS's own denialist cabal HIAG, about rehabilitating the myth of the Nazi 'Lost Cause', about whitewashing history through the medium of fiction. It is not in plot or setting that this book proclaims itself a fantasy, but in its overarching thesis: that the Nazis were the victims, not the perpetrators, of the most hideous criminal conspiracy of the twentieth century.

The Furred Reich is not simply bad; it is bad at every conceivable level. The text is unpolished, the prose is mediocre, the plot is schizophrenic, the characters are cardboard, the setting is bland, and none of it is endearing in even a cult-classic sense. For a work of propaganda, it betrays a fundamental failure to identify its audience: to neo-Nazis it is merely preaching to the parade ground; to history buffs the spin is insultingly opaque; to Furries the world is forgettable; smut fans can find far more fulfilling one-shots without having to wade through pages of fascist drek. Even judged on its wholly and utterly contemptible message that Nazi Germany was a phenomenon worth celebrating, it fails to leave a lasting impression beyond its tryhard self-indulgence. It is that student in middle school carving swastikas into the desk in a misplaced attempt to look 'tough', but without the excuse of ignorance. It is laughable because it is utterly sincere.

Do not waste your time on this book. Consider the one star compensation to the cover artist for the inevitable bad press incurred.