Cohen’s superb history restores them to memory.
The Nazi death camps were populated by “Jews and so-called troublemakers”—and at the very end of WWII, writes Cohen (Hearts Grown Brutal, 1998), by Americans who fit the description.
Award-winning New York Times correspondent Cohen opens still-fresh wounds at a time when influential German historians are calling for closure to the inconvenient matter of the Holocaust. “Germany wants to look forward. It wants above all to be ‘normal,’ ” he writes. “But in almost every German family there is a locked drawer, a place where some secret is kept.” The eastern German town of Berga harbored more than its share of secrets, for as the Allied armies were advancing on all sides, the SS hastened to build an underground synthetic-fuel production facility there. A low-level officer named Willy Hack was put in charge of the operation, and when the emaciated Jewish prisoners he requisitioned from nearby Buchenwald proved “incapable of productive effort,” he found a new supply of slave laborers in Americans taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge. Throughout the winter of 1944–45, some 350 of them worked alongside European prisoners in the mine galleries of Berga; most were American Jews carefully singled out for extermination, but the rest were those alleged troublemakers “and others simply grabbed at random.” The conditions were among the most brutal American POWs were ever forced to endure, though odd moments of humanity punctuated their captivity, as when the citizens of Berga sent the prisoners Christmas cookies and occasionally smuggled other food to them. While the Russian army advanced, the surviving Americans were marched west; dozens died along the way. Amazingly, Cohen writes, only days after being liberated by US troops, the survivors were required to sign security clearances that demanded that they remain silent about their imprisonment; one later guessed that the order “was expedient given the desire not to embarrass the German government” at the dawn of the Cold War—and so the men of Berga were forgotten.
Cohen’s superb history restores them to memory.Pub Date: April 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41410-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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