The Ratline
The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive
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4.2 • 100 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street.
"Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le Carré, internationally renowned bestselling author
Baron Otto von Wächter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948 . . .
Philippe Sands pieces together, in riveting detail, Wächter's extraordinary, shocking story. Given full access to the Wächter family archives--journals, diaries, tapes, and more--and with the assistance of the Wächters' son Horst, who believes his father to have been a "good man," Sands writes of Wächter's rise through the Nazi high command, his "blissful" marriage and family life as their world was brought to ruin, and his four-year flight to escape justice--to the Tirol, to Rome, and the Vatican; given a new identity, on his way to a new life via "the Ratline" to Perón's Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and thousands of other Nazis. Wächter's escape was cut short by his mysterious, shocking death in Rome, in the midst of the burgeoning Cold War (was he being recruited in postwar Italy by the Americans and the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps or by the Soviet NKVD or by both; or was he poisoned by one side or the other, as his son believes--or by both?) . . .
An extraordinary discovery, told up-close through access to a trove of family correspondence between Wächter and his wife--part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, part Cold War espionage thriller.
"Breathtaking, gripping, shattering." --Elif Shafak
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The past," William Faulkner sternly warned, "is never dead. It's not even past." His admonition is at the unarticulated narrative heart of this solemn, graceful, and powerful account by lawyer and historian Sands (East West Street). The sins, lies, and rationalizations of mothers and fathers who supported the Nazi regime, Sands makes uncomfortably clear, are massive burdens that weigh down the lives of the generations that follow. And for the descendants of those who suffered monstrously as the Final Solution goose-stepped its way across Europe, the martyrdom of their ancestors is a heavy knowledge, too; it is an armory of suppressed rage. For the children of both the murderers and the murdered, there is no escape., The tale is set in motion by a single ambition: to discover what happened to Otto W chter, the SS governor of the occupied city in Galicia where Sands's grandfather lived. On a tenacious journey, part hands-on investigation, part rumination, across Europe and on to America, Sands interviews a wide-ranging collection of fascinating characters to find answers (there is even a brief walk-on role for his neighbor, John le Carr )., Yet it would be a mistake to think of this rich, compulsively readable book as simply a treatise on the virulent scars etched deep by the Third Reich and its all-too-eager cohorts. Its rewards are many, and many-faceted. It is also a far-reaching whodunit into a mysterious death, where even the dead ends are engaging; a wartime love story between a high-ranking SS official and his ambitious wife (and a subtly corrosive portrait of their bewildering and criminal delusions as they enjoy their gilded life); a story of a son who desperately struggles in spite of condemning evidence "to find the good things" in his deeply flawed parents; an infuriating spotlight on cynically pragmatic ties between American spymasters, the Vatican, and Nazi war criminals; and, in a revelation that blindsides the reader, a resourceful probing into buried familial ties that reveal, as Sands writes in his carefully controlled prose, "the curiosity of life, the strange and unexpected points of connection.", Throughout, Sands is a reliable narrator gracious, wise, and intrepid. And at its very end, the long odyssey culminates in the book's final sentence, an unequivocal declaration by W chter's granddaughter, a headscarf-wearing Muslim convert: "My grandfather was a mass murderer." Her searing acknowledgment will resonate long after the reader turns the last page of this remarkable chronicle. , Howard Blum is the author of Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America and, most recently, Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.
