From the bestselling, acclaimed author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor, the fascinating story of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s maniacal attempt to found a utopian colony in the jungles of Paraguay in the late nineteenth century

A fascinating, provocative, and highly eccentric volume that is part biography, part travelogue, part detective story. -The New York Times

In 1886, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a racially pure colony in Paraguay with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Foerster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. More than a century later, Ben Macintyre tracked down the survivors of Nueva Germania, as the colony was called, and found a strange, tight-lipped people, still interbreeding to the point of genetic deterioration.

Digging into recently opened German archives, Macintyre unfolds how Elisabeth, who returned to Germany in 1893, grafted her anti-Semitic, nationalist ideas onto her brother’s philosophy, building a mythic cult around him, and how she later became a mentor to Hitler-her stately funeral in 1935 attended by a tearful Fuhrer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyre’s brilliant piece of investigative journalism explores how the Nazis perverted Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas to justify their evil deeds, and unearths a rich and disturbing vein of the twentieth century’s dark history.