The Austrian Books in Order

The Austrian is one of Ellie Midwood's darkest series. Instead of following a victim, resister, or outsider, these books move into the mind and memories of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Austrian Nazi official who also appears in The Girl from Berlin novels. That shift in viewpoint gives the series a very different feel. It is more psychological, more uncomfortable, and much more interested in how power and self-justification work from the inside.

The first book opens with Ernst facing the end of his life after the war, and from there the story moves between imprisonment and the earlier stages of his rise. Childhood, education, early convictions, ambition, personal relationships, and party politics all matter. Midwood is not writing a neat defense, and she is not writing a simple monster portrait either. The point is to show how a man can live inside his own logic while helping to sustain something monstrous.

It is meant to unsettle.

That is also where the series connects so strongly to The Girl from Berlin. If you have already met Ernst through Annalise's story, The Austrian deepens that connection and replays some of the same history from a different angle. Annalise remains important to Ernst's emotional life, but the books are not simply a romance in disguise. They are about obsession, memory, ego, moral blindness, and the stories people tell themselves when judgment is closing in.

The second book pushes further into war, compromise, and the widening gap between private feeling and public crime. Prison scenes sit against memories of service, ambition, and personal collapse, so the books keep asking what Ernst understood, what he refused to understand, and whether those two things can ever really be separated. That structure gives the series a constant pressure. The past is not over, and the present refuses to let it stay hidden.

Readers should know that this is not the most comfortable entry point into Midwood's work. The appeal here is not warmth. It is the tension of being placed close to someone whose actions and worldview are deeply compromised, and then being asked to keep reading anyway. If that kind of morally difficult historical fiction interests you, the series has real bite.

In the end, The Austrian works best as a companion to Midwood's broader Nazi Germany novels, especially The Girl from Berlin. It expands the world, complicates one of her most troubling characters, and keeps the focus on the question that runs through so much of her work: how people end up doing terrible things while still thinking of themselves as human beings.