The Kellner Affair: Matters of Life and Death

PETER M LARSEN and BEN ERICKSON, Dalton Watson, £329, ISBN 978 185443 291 9

You might expect a book thus titled to be a very in-depth look at the story of Jacques Kellner, Parisian creator of carrosserie to the automotive aristocracy, heroic French Resistance fighter, murdered by the Nazis in 1942 along with designer Georges Paulin and several others. The company’s handsome designs would be celebrated, the war crimes would be rued.

Yes, all that is here, in detail so forensic that it includes photographs of every related German indictment document and what is surely the definitive assemblage of Kellner brochures and Kellner-bodied cars: Hispano-Suizas, Bugattis (including a Type 41 with an impossibly long bonnet), Rolls-Royces, Renaults, Duesenbergs, Bentleys, even the odd Ford. But that’s not the half of it. Nor even, necessarily, the point.

Pouring out from 1056 pages, distributed between three slipcased A4-and-a-bit-sized volumes, is a net of interconnected tales told with soul-baring and sometimes quirky candour. It’s a story of Europe under Nazi control, catalysed by the authors’ visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial in 2016 and the few snippets of horror unwillingly told to Larsen (a concours judge) by his father Niels, a Danish Resistance fighter captured by the Gestapo.

There’s betrayal, propaganda, collaboration with the Germans (and how Saoutchik, another coachbuilder, was wrongly accused of it), stories of heroic escapes, help from Walter Sleator who ran Rolls-Royce’s French office and whose sister Aileen was also in the Resistance, and a chapter on the rise of aerodynamic design. It’s an eclectic and breathtaking mix. A very expensive mix, too.

It would be great to see it in a cheaper edition. Then more people would know. JS