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Night of the Aurochs is an unfinished novel written by the author Dalton Trumbo, possibly best known for his great anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun. Aurochs is an attempt by Trumbo to tell the tale of World War II through the eyes of a Nazi by the name of Grieban.
The story starts out narrated in the first person through a series of letters written by Grieban. At the end when the novel, however, the story is written in the Third person.
Although unfinished, some consider Trumbo's work a masterpiece. Many feel there are parts of the book that Trumbo may have removed if he had lived to completely edit the work. The book, compiled and edited by Robert Kirsch, is a hard look at the war through the eyes of an unremorseful Nazi who believes that what he and his people did was a service for the good of mankind. In his narration, Grieban tries to link the ethical nature of the Nazi movement to the American Civil War by saying the comparisons are undeniable: Fighting to keep the races pure and separated. Grieban may be looked at as the epitome of one fighting for the cause, but he himself fails to live up to his own high ideals of racial purity when he falls in 'love' with a Jewish woman during his years as a Nazi Concentration camp commandant.
For authenticity Trumbo, as was in the case of Johnny, tried to 'become' the character that he was writing about, and soon Grieban's fictional personality became linked with Trumbo's personality and vice versa. This is evident in the latter parts of the book where one can see sympathy for Grieban. To a lesser extend, Trumbo also elicits sympathy in the beginning of the book when Greiban is depicted as a broken man, living out the rest of his years in hiding, and ultimately dying with no one around who particularly cares about him.