A chilling, lawyerly study with laserlike focus.
A painstakingly researched work regards the brief period early in Hitler’s chancellorship when the murderous events at Dachau might have been stopped by law and order.
Paris-based author Ryback (Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life, 2008, etc.) tracks the crescendo of events in early 1933, after Hitler blamed the mysterious Reichstag fire on a communist conspiracy and a wave of arrests began filling the first concentration camp outside Munich—accompanied by suspicious deaths. Deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger of the Dachau jurisdiction, where the detention center for political prisoners had been erected on the site of a former munitions factory, was informed on April 13 that four prisoners had been shot and killed while trying to escape. Investigating the murders, Hartinger and a few loyal colleagues discovered that the prison was not under the command of Bavarian state police, but under the Nazi SS: vicious and unrestrained officers who had unleashed a string of atrocities against the victims (all of whom, it turned out, were Jews). More deaths followed, and Hartinger, a middling civil servant and devout Roman Catholic who showed astounding courage at this dangerous juncture, proceeded with indictments against the murderous guards, despite a warning from the chief prosecutor, in cahoots with chief of Bavarian police Heinrich Himmler, that he would not sign them. Nonetheless, before May 30, when Dachau was officially transferred to SS authority, there was an attempt to regulate it by the rule of law. Ryback ties Hartinger’s report (which eventually surfaced at the postwar Nuremberg trials) to an earlier landmark study, Emil Gumbel’s Four Years of Political Murder (1922), in which the University of Heidelberg professor attempted to explain the upsurge in violence sweeping the land of “poets and thinkers” in the immediate postwar years.
A chilling, lawyerly study with laserlike focus.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35291-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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