A footnote to history that will interest students of World War II.
Military historian Sayer (co-author: Nazi Gold: The Story of the World's Greatest Robbery—And Its Aftermath, 1984) and biographer/historian Dronfield (The Stone Crusher: The True Story of a Father and Son’s Fight for Survival in Auschwitz, 2018) examine a little-known episode in the final days of Nazi Germany.
Readers familiar with the history of the Third Reich will know that various German officers and diplomats floated offers of a separate peace and conditional surrender to the Western Allies. Less familiar is a desperate operation, ordered by Hitler himself, to use “Prominenten”—important prisoners of the regime such as French socialist leader Léon Blum and the opposition pastor Martin Niemöller, to say nothing of a couple of British officers fortuitously named Churchill—as bargaining chips to be used in negotiation, and killed if negotiation failed. The prisoners were both civilian and military, including officers of the Red Army, the Greek government, and Great Britain, the last having become specialists at escape from previous internments. Gathered from various prison camps around the Reich, the “VIP hostages" were taken south into an area that was a supposedly impregnable mountain fastness where the Reich would resist the Allied invaders indefinitely. As it happens, that resistance crumbled, and 139 Prominenten survived. The authors’ prose is mostly serviceable, but the story that unfolds is engaging not just for the facts, but also for the possibilities: What if the Nazis had stuck it out in their alpine strongholds and actually played their chips? Of particular interest is the closing chapter, a sequence of denouements that are sometimes surprising and sometimes grimly inevitable: The Soviets executed a couple of their imprisoned generals, with one “rehabilitated” 16 years afterward, so that “he was unable to benefit from the decision,” while one of the erstwhile captors involved himself in a postwar organization that supported fugitive war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
A footnote to history that will interest students of World War II.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-92155-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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