A perceptive and engrossing examination of a horrifying chapter in Germany’s recent history.
A disturbing, eye-opening look at the neo-Nazi murder spree that took place in Germany in the early 2000s.
Kushner, a foreign correspondent and professor of international reporting and migration, turns his attention to a disturbing series of racially motivated murders in Germany’s post–World War II history. He begins by tracing the rise of neo-Nazism in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when three teenagers in the small town of Jena became increasingly involved in the far-right movement. In the early 1990s, Beate Zschäpe met Uwe Mundlos, a bright youth who was enamored with Germany’s dark 20th-century history. “To many Germans,” writes the author, “pride in the past wasn’t just taboo—it was unthinkable.” Zschäpe and Mundlos became a couple, and in 1994, they met the third member of their trio, Uwe Böhnhardt. If Mundlos was the brains of the National Socialist Underground, the neo-Nazi terror group they formed, Böhnhardt brought an element of reckless violence. A beloved youngest son, Böhnhardt was in and out of juvenile detention as a teen, and he became a “sadistic…fighting machine.” Kushner moves nimbly among the personal relationships of the three young extremists, who would go on to commit a series of ethnically motivated murders from 2000 to 2011, and he effectively shows how and why German officials often ignored signs of white supremacist terrorism, even mistakenly blaming immigrants for acts of violence. “Germany’s failure to recognize its first white terrorist spree of the twenty-first century—much less stop it—is a chilling warning for other nations that are failing to fight extremists at home,” writes the author. “Having briefly earned a reputation as a haven for the world’s refugees, Germany is now struggling to protect them from violence by native-born whites.”
A perceptive and engrossing examination of a horrifying chapter in Germany’s recent history.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781538708118
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MODERN | WORLD | ETHNICITY & RACE
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
