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DAS REICH

MARCH OF THE SECOND SS PANZER DIVISION THROUGH FRANCE

On D-Day the Das Reich, or 2nd Panzer Division, was at Montauban in southern France, 450 miles—and, supposedly, a few days—from the Normandy battlefront. Why, instead, "the Das Reich Division trickled into the rear battlefields piecemeal," some ten to 25 days later, is the spine on which Hastings (Yoni, Bomber Command) hangs an array of disclosures, insights, and reflections. The book is not narrative history—the actual march of the Das Reich begins a third of the way through, and is then told in snatches; and the interests it addresses—sometimes, profoundly—are not those of the ordinary WW II buff. First, Hastings focuses on the French Section of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE)—operating out of London and via agents in France—which, with little support from SHAEF (and that, at Churchill's insistence), supplied the Resistance forces with the wherewithal (equipment, training, money) to prevent the Das Reich from moving north by train and impede the column's progress by road. But the Germans also decided, to the surprise of the Allies, to fight the local resistants (Hitler would give no ground); and so delayed themselves. Few resistants, in turn, "understood fire discipline": they wasted ammunition and, under German counterattack, quickly took flight. (All the more remarkable, thinks Hastings, their accomplishments.) Uninvolved civilians, mostly apathetic or openly unsympathetic, then suffered German reprisals: notoriously, the killing of hostages after the Tulle insurrection, the unprovoked massacre at Oradour. Here, Hastings' findings are stark. "Painful though it may be for humanitarians to accept, a policy of unlimited repression can be formidably effective"; further immediate resistance was discouraged. And to the SS officers, hardened on the Russian front, "It was nothing"—as a veteran of Oradour put it long afterward. Hastings also has highly interesting, almost self-contained chapters on the inter-Allied Jedburgh teams and the "private army" Special Air Service (SAS)—briefly involved at different points on the Das Reich march. What the book lacks in unity, indeed, it makes up in diversity and penetration. The ideal reader, though, would be familiar with the setting or the special branches.

Pub Date: May 1, 1982

ISBN: 003057059X

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1982

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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