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The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive Hardcover – Deckle Edge, February 2, 2021
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"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
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateFebruary 2, 2021
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.48 x 9.53 inches
- ISBN-100525520961
- ISBN-13978-0525520962
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Fascinating and haunting, a disquieting book that raises more questions than Sands could possibly answer ... a book that should be read and pondered again and again."--BookPage
"Part detective story and part love story ... Sands's ability to tease out Horst's emotional, and often contradictory, views of his father as an indicted war criminal is fascinating ... he unlocks here a series of provocative questions about culpability, collective guilt, and the advancement of international law."--LA Review of Books
"Solemn, graceful, and powerful ... rich, compulsively readable ... 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 ... Sands is a reliable narrator--gracious, wise, and intrepid ... a remarkable chronicle."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Extraordinary ... fast-paced ... with enough twists and turns to keep the reader grimly absorbed, The Ratline is an electrifying true crime."--Evening Standard
"A gripping adventure, an astounding journey of discovery, and a terrifying and timely portrait of evil in all its complexity, banality, self-justification, and madness. A stunning achievement."--Stephen Fry
"Poignant ... shocking ... estraordinarily moving."--Daily Express
"Breathtaking, gripping, and ultimately, shattering. Philippe Sands has done the unimaginable: look a butcher in the eye and tell his story without flinching."--Elif Shafak
"A burningly necessary book. Sands makes a gently unsparing dissection of deception, love, delusion, and ineradicable evil. Elegant, painstaking, passionate, and quietly enraging."--A.L. Kennedy
"A triumph of research and brilliant storytelling."--Antony Beevor
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
2012, Hagenberg
The beginning was the visit to Horst Wächter, in the spring of 2012, when the fourth child of Otto and Charlotte Wächter first welcomed me to his home. I crossed a disused moat and passed through the large wooden doors of Schloss Hagenberg, to encounter a musty smell, the incense of burning wood that clung to Horst. We drank tea, I met his wife Jacqueline, he told me about his daughter Magdalena, his five brothers and sisters. I learned too about his mother’s papers, although many years would pass before I would see them all.
The visit was an accident. Eighteen months earlier, I travelled to the city of Lviv, in Ukraine, to deliver a lecture on “crimes against humanity” and “genocide.” Ostensibly, I went to visit the law faculty, but the true reason for the journey was a desire to find the house where my grandfather was born. In 1904, Leon Buchholz’s city was known as Lemberg, a regional capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
I hoped to fill gaps in Leon’s life story, to discover what happened to his family, about which he maintained a discreet silence. I wanted to learn about his identity, and mine. I found Leon’s house, and discovered that the origins of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” legal ideas invented in 1945, could be traced to the city of his birth. The journey caused me to write a book, East West Street, the story of four men: Leon, whose large family from Lemberg and its environs was obliterated in the Holocaust; Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, also from the city, two jurists who put the terms “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” into the Nuremberg trials and international law; and Hans Frank, Governor General of German-occupied Poland, who arrived in Lemberg in August 1942 and gave a speech which was followed by the extermination of the Jews of the region known as Galicia. The victims of Frank’s actions, for which he was convicted and hanged at Nuremberg, were four million in number. They included the families of Leon, Lauterpacht and Lemkin.
In the course of the research I came across a remarkable book by Niklas Frank, entitled The Father, about Hans Frank. I sought out Niklas, and one day we met, on the terrace of a fine hotel near Hamburg. In the course of our conversation, knowing of my interest in Lemberg, he mentioned Otto Wächter. One of his father’s deputies, Wächter served as Nazi governor in Lemberg from 1942 to 1944, and Niklas knew one of the children, Horst. As I was interested in the city, and as it was during Wächter’s time in Lemberg that Leon’s family perished, Niklas offered to make an introduction. It came with a mild warning: unlike Niklas, who harboured a negative view of his parent—“I am against the death penalty, except in the case of my father,” he said within an hour of meeting—Horst embraced a more positive view of his father. “But you will like him,” Niklas said, with a smile.
Horst responded positively to the introduction. I flew from London to Vienna, rented a car, headed north across the River Danube, past vineyards and hills, to the tiny, ancient village of Hagenberg. “I’ll dance with you in Vienna,” the radio sang, “I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook.” During the journey I felt a sense of anxiety, as Otto Wächter most likely played a role in the fate of Leon’s relatives in and around Lemberg, all but one of whom perished during his rule. His name seemed to have been airbrushed out of the historical narrative for that period. I gleaned that he was Austrian, a husband and a father, a lawyer and a senior Nazi. In 1934 he was involved in the assassination of the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. After the Nazis arrived in Austria in March 1938, following the Anschluss, he had a senior position in the new government in Vienna, where my grandparents lived. Later he was appointed governor of Nazi-occupied Kraków, and then, in 1942, governor of Lemberg. After the war, he disappeared off the face of the earth. I wanted to know what happened to him, whether justice was done. For that I would leave no stone unturned. The journey began.
I need not have worried about Horst. He greeted me with enthusiasm, a tall and attractive man, genial in a pink shirt and Birkenstocks, with a twinkle in his eyes, and an embracingly guttural, warm, hesitant, gentle voice. He was delighted I had travelled to the dilapidated baroque castle that was his home, constructed around an internal courtyard, imposing and square, four storeys high, with thick, stone walls and a moat covered in a vibrant undergrowth.
A famous actor just visited, he enthused, with an Italian director. “Two Oscar winners at my castle!” They were filming The Best Offer, a tale of love and crime set across Europe, in Vienna, Trieste, Bolzano and Rome. Little did I know, back then, the relevance of these places to the Wächters.
Accompanied by a cat, we entered the schloss, a solid building that had seen better days. We walked past a workshop, filled with tools and other implements, drying fruit and potatoes and other vegetables, and met the dog. Horst found the building in the 1960s when it hosted a colony of artists. A place of “secret festivities,” he explained. Two decades later he bought it with a modest inheritance left to him after Charlotte’s death.
He shared the basics of his life. Born in Vienna on 14 April 1939, he was named after the “Horst Wessel Song,” a Nazi anthem. His parents chose Arthur as his middle name, in honour of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, his father’s comrade and friend, and Horst’s godfather. He was a lawyer with tortoiseshell spectacles who sat at Adolf Hitler’s top table, who served briefly as chancellor of Austria, after the Anschluss, and governor of Ostmark, as Austria was known in the Third Reich. Shortly after Horst’s birth, Seyss-Inquart was appointed minister without portfolio in Hitler’s cabinet, and soon after that given the task of governing occupied Holland. Hitler’s last will and testament, written in 1945, appointed Seyss-Inquart to be foreign minister of the Reich. Within a few months the lawyer and godfather was caught, tried at Nuremberg and hanged by the neck for the crimes he committed.
I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to see a small black and white photograph of Seyss-Inquart near Horst’s bed. It was tucked into the frame of a photograph of his father Otto, near an oil painting of his grandfather, General Josef Wächter, a military man who served in the imperial army during the First World War. A photo of Charlotte taken in 1942 hung on another wall of the bedroom. Horst slept close to the family.
Horst introduced me to his wife Jacqueline (Ollèn), who was Swedish. They occupied two cosy rooms on the ground floor of the castle, heated with a large wood-burning stove, although their relationship did not seem so tender. He made tea and talked more affectionately about his parents than did Jacqueline. It was immediately apparent that they continued to occupy a special place in his heart. He seemed especially close to his mother, for whom he cared during the last years of her life, a woman who, I would learn, loved him as her favourite. Charlotte’s relationship with Horst’s four sisters was more difficult, and when they grew up three of them moved abroad.
During that first visit, Horst impressed upon me that he hardly knew his father, who was often absent during the war years, in faraway places. With the family in Austria, he might be in Kraków, Lemberg or Italy, or in Berlin. I learned that he was a “lady’s man,” that he disappeared after the war, then died in Rome.
That was all Horst said on that first visit. Somehow, in an indirect way, he explained, the castle was a gift from Otto, a place of refuge and solace. “I dropped out of normality,” he said, when he was in his thirties. He left behind a regular life, because of his father’s story, hoping to find an alternative way.
Normality ended for Horst in 1945, six years old when the war was lost. “I was raised like a young Nazi boy, then from one day to the next everything was gone.” It was a trauma, national and personal, as the regime broke down and life around the family collapsed, a happy childhood punctured. He evoked a memory of his birthday party in April 1945, sitting outside the family home in Thumersbach, looking across Lake Zell. “I was alone and knew I should remember this moment for all my life.” His soft voice cracked as he recalled British and American planes dropping unused bombs into the waters. “The house started to shiver, yes, I remember . . .” His voice trailed off, his eyes moistened, I felt the shiver. He cried, softly, for a brief moment.
Later, Horst escorted me around the castle, a place of many rooms, large and small. We settled in his bedroom, on the first floor, under the gaze of Josef, Otto, Charlotte and godfather Arthur. He brought out Charlotte’s photo albums, we sat together, the images perched on our knees. He alluded to an extensive family archive, many letters between his parents, his mother’s diaries and reminiscences, written for the children, for posterity. I did not see these materials, that day, but they left a memory that intrigued.
I did see a few pages from one diary, from 1942, a tiny volume filled with his mother’s busy writing. I was interested in 1 August, the day Hans Frank visited the Wächters in Lemberg to announce the implementation of the Final Solution across the District of Galicia, a speech that offered a sentence of death for hundreds of thousands of human beings. The diary entry for that day told us that Frank played chess with Charlotte.
We returned to the photographs from the albums, a story of family life, of children and grandparents, of celebrations and holidays in the mountains. The Wächters together, a contented family. There were lakes, and a photo of Otto swimming, the only one I would ever see. “My father loved to swim,” Horst said. Over the page a man with a smile and a chisel carved a swastika into a wall, 1931. A man stood outside a building, greeted by a line of arms raised in Nazi salute. Dr. Goebbels it said under the photograph. Three men in conversation, in a covered yard. Two letters under the photograph, A.H. This was Otto’s angular writing. Adolf Hitler with Heinrich Hoffmann, I would learn, his photographer, and a third man. “Not my father,” Horst said. “Maybe Baldur von Schirach.” This was a reference to the head of the Hitler Youth, also convicted at Nuremberg, whose grandson Ferdinand was a fine writer.
We turned more pages. Vienna, autumn 1938, Otto in his office at the Hofburg Palace, in a distinct SS uniform. Poland, autumn 1939, a burnt-out building, refugees. A crowded street, people dressed against the cold, an old lady in a headscarf, a white armband. A Jew photographed by Charlotte, in the Warsaw ghetto. A photograph of Horst, with three of his four sisters. “March 1943, Lemberg,” Charlotte wrote underneath. A day of bright sun, with long shadows. A note from Horst to Otto. “Dear Papa, I’ve picked you some flowers, kisses, yours, Horsti-Borsti.” He was five back then, in 1944.
We danced around more delicate subjects. He asked about my grandfather, listened in silence to the details. I enquired about his parents and their relationship. “My mother was convinced that my father was right, did the right things.” She never spoke a bad word about him, not in Horst’s presence, but he came to recognise there was a dark side. “Of course, I felt guilty about my father.” He knew about the “horrible things” the regime had done, but it was only later that they intruded into daily life. The period after the war was a time of silence. No one in Austria wanted to talk about the events, not then, not now. He alluded to difficulties with the family, with his nephews and nieces, but no details were offered.
We passed to other matters. Charlotte wanted Horst to be a successful lawyer, like his father, but he chose another life. No more studies, he told Charlotte, he would disappear into the woods. “Bye-bye mother.” She was deeply disappointed that he found his own path. In Vienna, in the early 1970s, he was introduced to a painter, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and the two men connected. “I knew Hundertwasser would need me, we would get along, because he was a shy person, like me.” Horst worked as the artist’s assistant, sailed his boat, the Regentag—“rainy day”—from Venice to New Zealand, accompanied by his new wife, Jacqueline. During that voyage their only child was born, a daughter, Magdalena. That was 1977.
“Somehow, that Hundertwasser was Jewish was good for my feelings,” Horst continued. “Perhaps also with you, Philippe, because you are Jewish, somehow this is attractive for me.” The artist’s mother feared Horst. “She knew my father’s name, who he was, with her experiences in the war, running around with a Star of David . . .” As he spoke his fingers danced across his arm, where an armband might have been.
Yet, he explained, the historical responsibility of his father was a complex matter. Otto was against the racial theories, didn’t see the Germans as supermen and all others as Untermenschen. “He wanted to do something good, to get things moving, to find a solution to the problems after the first war.”
That was Horst’s view. His father as a decent man, an optimist, who tried to do good but who got caught up in the horrors occasioned by others.
I listened patiently, not wanting to disturb the atmosphere of our first meeting.
A few days later, back in London, I received a message from Horst. “I appreciated your visit to Hagenberg, to learn of the tragic story of your grandfather’s family in Lemberg.” He offered the address of a man from Lemberg whose life he said his father had saved, a Polish Jew. Back then, he added, the “deplorable situation of the Jews was generally accepted as ‘Schicksal.’ ” The word meant fate.
As to his own situation, he said that his solitude had been relieved by my visit. Other members of the family did not wish to talk about the past, and were critical of his endeavours. They did not wish for a spotlight on the life of Otto von Wächter.
I left our first encounter curious and fascinated. I could not help but like Horst, gentle and open, seemingly with nothing to hide. He was a son who wanted to find the good in his father. At the same time, he was unwilling to countenance the idea that Otto Wächter bore any real responsibility for terrible events that occurred on the territory he ruled. I wanted to know more about his parents. Details matter.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (February 2, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525520961
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525520962
- Item Weight : 1.8 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.48 x 9.53 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #503,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #925 in Jewish Holocaust History
- #1,615 in Crime & Criminal Biographies
- #18,027 in Politics & Government (Books)
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Customers find the book well-researched and informative. They describe it as an engaging and fast-paced read that keeps them hooked. The writing quality is praised as good and the story is thought-provoking on many levels. Overall, customers find it a valuable addition to Holocaust literature and an interesting complement to East West Street.
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Customers find the book engaging and absorbing. They describe it as a fast-paced thriller that keeps them hooked.
"...He’s a good - not great - writer who knows his stuff. His book is good reading as long as you know something about the times and the people." Read more
"...then you should note that the book is infinitely richer and more rewarding. Highly recommended." Read more
"...be fully acknowledged or held to account, but Sands has written a remarkable book that will sear its record into readers’ minds and hearts...." Read more
"This is a very detailed book, and it takes some time to read and digest, but it also is profoundly moving and fascinating...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's depth of story. They find it well-researched, with a deft integration of storytelling and facts. The book is described as informative, interesting, and a valuable addition to the historical narrative. Readers also mention that the book is a lesson in historical narrative and how history intertwines with historians.
"...The book is meticulously researched and professionally written, and while some may fault the author for not being more harsh in some of his judgments..." Read more
"...This book is impeccably written and researched. The pacing is such that the flow of history is revealed in a logical, concise way...." Read more
"...Deftly integrating storytelling and facts, The Ratline is a valuable and unique addition to Holocaust literature." Read more
"...The writing is engaging and the author's research is first rate. But this is actually several books...." Read more
Customers enjoy the writing quality. They find it well-written and engaging, like a novel.
"...The book is meticulously researched and professionally written, and while some may fault the author for not being more harsh in some of his judgments..." Read more
"...This book is impeccably written and researched. The pacing is such that the flow of history is revealed in a logical, concise way...." Read more
"...The writing is engaging and the author's research is first rate. But this is actually several books...." Read more
"Another piece of superb writting by Sands. Deep digging, exploration ,investigation, probing. He is great asking questions,...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's pacing. They find the story fascinating and thought-provoking. The book is a valuable addition to Holocaust literature, set in the early Cold War, when former friends turned into foes.
"...Second, the book is a Nazi atrocity story about a man whose name deserves to be as well known as more familiar ones, like Himmler...." Read more
"...law at University College, London and at Harvard University, tells a fascinating story that deals with moral equivocation and intrigue of which..." Read more
"Well written and researched..it is a fascinating story of a Nazi and his Nazi wife who never felt remorse over the past...." Read more
"...Well researched and presented and thought provoking on many levels." Read more
Customers find the book interesting and fast-paced. They say it's a great read and an interesting complement to East West Street.
"...some time to read and digest, but it also is profoundly moving and fascinating...." Read more
"Interesting, fast paced. Really great read!" Read more
"Interesting complement to East West Street..." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2021Mark Twain quipped that truth is often stranger than fiction because fiction has to be believable. Accurate as it is, however, that insightful observation doesn’t do this book justice. An historical narrative, this story ultimately reads like the most engrossing novel you’ve ever read.
On the surface, it is the story of Baron Otto von Wächter, a womanizing Austrian lawyer who became a high Nazi official, a senior SS officer, and among other things, the former governor of Galicia (Poland) for the Third Reich. He created the infamous Krakow ghetto and was ultimately indicted as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, although the number of people he was responsible for slaughtering was undoubtedly much higher.
After the war Wachter escaped to Rome, where he hid in plain sight and ultimately died of unknown causes. He was never brought to justice for his war atrocities and much of the most incredible details of the book have to do with why.
The book is meticulously researched and professionally written, and while some may fault the author for not being more harsh in some of his judgments, I believe that is very much to his credit, because at least one of the major themes of the book is the power, very often abused, of rationalization.
The story of Otto is also the story of Charlotte, his wife, a protagonist unlike any you have ever encountered, her powers of self-delusion equaled only by her total inability to abide by any moral compass. And it includes an ongoing dialogue and debate between the author and the Wachter’s youngest son, Horst, who spends the entire book, despite finally admitting that he never really knew his father, defending his father as a good man only doing what he was forced to do and, in fact, doing much good along the way.
The Ratline refers to an escape route set up after the war to help former (and generally unrepentant) Nazis escape through Rome on their way to South America and the Middle East. Otto became a part of it, as did Soviet and American Intelligence, the latter of which may have set up the whole thing.
In the end, the rationalization is overwhelmingly disheartening, and when I was finally able to put down the book, it left me deeply saddened. Does the end always justify the means? I don’t think so. Yet, few in this story, other than the author himself, seem to have ever considered the question, a fact starkly reinforced by the author’s attempts to be balanced and to reserve his harshest judgments. (A brilliant literary strategy, I think.)
Charlotte’s failure to condemn Otto, or even repent her own villainous activities and involvement (she stole many precious pieces of art and other valuables), is deplorable. Horst’s insistence on the goodness of his father is too, but perhaps a little more understandable. What truly rocked my core, however, was the degree to which American Intelligence, after the war, embraced known Nazis in order to use them as tools in the Cold War. They clearly knew Otto was in Rome for many months, for example, but never made any attempt to bring him to justice. And both the father and the father-in-law of one man who the author uncovered were American spies after the war, the former, an American Intelligence officer, actually being the handler of the latter, a known SS officer and heinous war criminal.
What, in the end, do we really stand for if every moral dilemma becomes a transactional decision that we can rationalize in our self-interest as we momentarily define it? What do we teach our children? What ultimate fate do we crystalize?
In the end, the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews and other innocent civilians and many of fathers, sons, brothers, and other relatives died trying to stop them. While we shouldn’t blame current generations for the barbarous acts of their elders, none of those lost should ever be forgotten for any reason, whatever the rationalization.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2021Okay, I’ve been trying to figure out what to write in this review of Philippe Sands’ book, “The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive”. The book’s title doesn’t exactly square with what I’d always thought the post-WW2 ratlines were, which were escape routes out of Europe for Nazis to settle in South America or some Middle-East countries. But in the case of Otto von Wachter, governor of the Polish area around Kraków, he got as far as Rome before dying in 1949 of an infection of some sort, presumably caught from swimming in fetid waters.
I finished a long, convoluted review of the book but as I reread the review, it made very little sense at all. It is difficult to explain what the book is about except that Otto von Wachter was a wanted Nazi war criminal who evaded capture after the war and died before escaping to more pleasant “political” climes. There are other Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, particularly as part of Pope Pius XII’s Vatican, who are also on the run. Otto von Wachter’s wife and son are also part of the story. Horst Wachter has never come to terms with his father’s guilt and his mother, Charlotte, was seen as an abeter to Otto’s activity, both during and after the war.
Phillipe Sands is an international lawyer who has written a couple of other books about other Nazis. He’s a good - not great - writer who knows his stuff. His book is good reading as long as you know something about the times and the people.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2021This book is the follow up to East West Street. It is written by Philippe Sands who is a lawyer specialising in international law.
In East West Street we are introduced to Otto Wachter, governor of Lemberg and Nazi. In this book we learn a lot more about Otto's journey into national socialism and his deeds in world war II. It ends with him going into hiding after the end of WW II and how he ended up in Rome where he died. There is very little about the actual Ratline in the book. For that history you may want to read Unholy Trinity or Justice not vengeance.
This is really four stories which intertwine throughout the book. The lead historical characters are Otto and Charlotte Wachter. The real stars are Philippe Sands and Horst Wachter. Horst is one of Otto's six children and the real story is the interaction between the author whose family was killed in the concentration camps and Horst who tries not to see that Otto was responsible for the deaths of Sands' family and many more. Horst is not a holocaust denier and not an anti-semite but his family loyalty skews his reading of history and Sands tries to show him a different world view.
This book is impeccably written and researched. The pacing is such that the flow of history is revealed in a logical, concise way. It is a lesson in historical narrative and in how history intertwines with historians and families. If you've heard the "Ratline" podcast then you should note that the book is infinitely richer and more rewarding. Highly recommended.