A thoroughgoing, sobering look at a horrific Faustian bargain.
From British journalist Jeffreys (Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, 2004), a walloping exposé of the chemical industry that funded the Nazi machine.
The creation of synthetic dyes, the development of aspirin and other great advances in chemistry and medicine from the mid-19th to 20th century were effected by the Germans, thanks to their technical training and abundance of coal for production, notes the author. Chemist Carl Bosch engineered the “fixing” of nitrogen, which led to the manufacture of synthetic fertilizer and the making of high explosives and mustard gas during World War I. In 1916, a cluster of German chemical firms including Bayer, BASF, Agfa and Hoechst united to form the cartel IG Farben, which grew into a colossus during the 1920s. Headed by Bosch, it pioneered the extraction of synthetic oil from coal along with a synthetic rubber (buna) that would pave the way for German self-sufficiency. Hitler commended the industry’s efforts, and IG Farben made huge donations to the newly powerful Nazi party, complying meekly with the purge of valuable Jewish scientists from its industries. Jeffreys doggedly pursues this dense and frequently bewildering story of tight-knit collaboration, which extended to such American companies as Standard Oil. IG Farben’s complicity fed the aggressive megalomania of Hitler, from the Four-Year Plan that directed all industry to serve the needs of the Reich, through the “wolverine speed” with which IG took over chemical plants in Poland and France once the Nazis rolled in, to the erection of a new buna factory manned by available slave labor at Auschwitz. Did IG’s managers know what was happening to the Jews in these factories of death? “The short, simple, and unequivocal answer is…yes,” writes Jeffreys, whose detailed examination of the facts decisively refutes “the blanket protestations of ignorance” made by IG’s chiefs after the war. Nonetheless, 24 IG executives evaded justice at Nuremberg, thanks to insufficient evidence.
A thoroughgoing, sobering look at a horrific Faustian bargain.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7813-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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