Blobel's Jewish contingent that travels around Eastern Europe exhuming the bodies of massacred Jews and disposing of them in an effort to hide the evidence of Nazi mass murder. Plot criticisms One frequently cited criticism of the plot is that Wouk's repeated references to history take precedence over character development as well as the observations and ideas he offers to explain WWII in a larger context. As a result, the plot is occasionally too predictable, and Wouk seems at times to force the history to comply with his own observations about WWII and mankind. Larry Swindel noted that "there is deficient characterization throughout for any reader not already acquainted with the principals", and "the characters are reduced to pawns on the chessboard of history". Another critic noted that Wouk's personal commentary could have been better presented through his characters and that he should have been able to make his own observations about history through the structure of the novel itself. Nonetheless, it was felt that the book was an interesting, informative read, and that the reader could relate emotionally to the plight of the central characters. Wouk stated in a lecture which addressed the novel and the nature of warfare then and now, "The sadness is the present reality...I tell you now that I have no solutions. I will offer no facile optimism." Another critic noted that in regards to the novel's depiction of the holocaust, that it may be a serious "trivialization of history to employ old fashioned tricks of plotting, such as the chapter-ending cliffhanger, in dramatizing such grave events". Perhaps the most significant critical praise of the book and its prequel, The Winds of War, is that Wouk used the tools of the novel to identify the psychological mechanisms and rationalizations that allowed intelligent, well meaning individuals to fail to take needed action to forestall the rise of Hitler's Germany, the ensuring war and the resulting holocaust. Central message Wouk concludes in the novel, "that war is an old habit of thought, an old frame of mind, an old political technique, that must now pass as human sacrifice and human slavery have passed...The beginning and the end of War lies in Remembrance." The novel's central message put more plainly by its primary character Victor Henry, after he experiences the Battles of Leyte Gulf, is "Either war is finished or we are". At the end of the novel,