A well-researched book that clarifies many misconceptions.
A new look at Hitler’s secret state police as a smaller crack force than is widely known, relying on the work of German citizen informers.
A historian specializing in World War II and the Third Reich, McDonough (Sophie Scholl: Heroine of the German Resistance, 2009, etc.) offers a nuanced study of the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, which by 1939 had merged the various police forces for Nazi Germany and was empowered with rooting out subversive and “anti-social” elements. The author reminds us that the galvanizing force in the initial creation of the Gestapo was Hitler’s need to suppress forces of communism in the government, and four key figures would achieve control over all of the security services: Hermann Göring and Rudolf Diels in Prussia and Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich in Bavaria. McDonough delineates how the “Night of the Long Knives” of June 30, 1934, brutally eliminated any opposition to the Gestapo, including the murder of Ernst Röhm, leader of the storm troopers. Under the directorship of Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo proceeded with lethal efficiency, enlisting for its officers the most educated men, such as law graduates, and offering quick promotion of young people, which “gave the regime its energetic radicalism.” The rank-and-file members were lower-class career policemen and not necessarily avid members of the Nazi Party. After sketching the makeup of the organization, the author then delves into the victims of the secret police force who posed a danger to the state and its increasingly draconian racial laws. The victims included religious objectors, mostly Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Protestants and Evangelicals tended to be pro-Nazi); communists, who had been the passionate voice of the German industrial working class in the Weimar era; “social outsiders” such as criminals and homosexuals; and such “racial enemies” as Gypsies and Jews. McDonough devotes an entire chilling chapter to the makeup of the informers, who were mostly middle- and upper-class citizens.
A well-researched book that clarifies many misconceptions.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1465-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 Yorker staff 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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