Book of the Year: Inside the Nazi Labyrinth – And Our Own
I just finished reading what must be the book of the year. I know that 2021 is still young, but if you have any interest in history, the mysterious nature of human cruelty, the equally unfathomable bloodline loyalties of family, and the dark labyrinth of espionage then you must read The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. After researching the poisonous life of Allen Dulles, America’s top Cold War spy, for my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I thought I knew everything important about the twisted escape routes of Nazi war criminals after World War II. And several of the key characters in my own postwar chapters make appearances in The Ratline, including Dulles himself and a few of the Nazi mass murderers whom he helped flee justice, like leading executioners and apologists Karl Wolff, Walter Rauff, Eugen Dollmann and Reinhard Gehlen. But the main subject of The Ratline is a high-ranking SS official I’d never heard of – Otto von Wachter. With The Ratline, Wachter now joins the death’s-head ranks of the Third Reich’s most evil functionaries.
Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline, is a professor and litigator of international law. But he pursues his long-dead and still largely hidden quarry not only with legal determination, but with the narrative skills of a great novelist. Sands’s zeal to fully understand Wachter and his crimes also has personal motivations. While acting as Hitler’s governor of Poland, Wachter rounded up tens of thousands of Jews and deported them to death camps – including many in Sands’s own family.
Sands’s journey of discovery takes him from Vienna to Berlin to Krakow to remote villages in the Alps -- where Wachter hid for three years after the war -- and finally to Rome, where Wachter died in July 1949 under mysterious circumstances while in the care of a notorious pro-Nazi Vatican bishop named Alois Hudal. Along the way, the author develops a strange relationship – friendship is too strong a word – with Wachter’s youngest son, Horst, who lives in a decrepit castle outside Vienna surrounded by eerie memorabilia from his father’s life.
Horst barely knew Otto, who was either helping to run the Third Reich with disturbing precision (he was a lawyer who dispatched several of his own former law professors – all Jews – to the gas chambers), or on the run from the Nuremberg hangman’s noose while his six children were young. But Horst was absolutely devoted to his mother, Charlotte, also a dedicated Nazi – and felt compelled to carry on her revisionist mission regarding his dead father.
Through years of visits to Horst’s strange castle and frequent communications with the “Nazi son,” Sands felt equally compelled to make him accept the truth about his monstrous father. Horst is the only one of his siblings who will engage with Sands about the family’s dark past. And yet Horst keeps finding ways to deflect the awful truth, even when Sands confronts him with shocking photographic evidence of his father’s criminality, including pictures that showed Otto Wachter and other SS officials looking blankly on as 50 young, randomly selected Poles were executed by a Nazi firing squad in reprisal for the assassination of a Nazi official.
As Sands keeps digging deeper into Otto Wachter’s sinister past – poring over damning official records and even Charlotte’s psychotically cheerful diary entries about her “sensitive, joyful, optimistic husband” – Horst keeps urging the author to keep an “open mind” about his father and the reasons he enthusiastically became a Nazi in his youth. By the end, it’s hard for the reader to fathom whether Otto Wachter’s cold murderousness or Horst Wachter’s insistent obliviousness is more disturbing.
This is a deep and even entertaining, page-turning investigation into human evil and the family fog that usually surrounds it. I have read many books about Hitler’s reign and the compromised efforts to bring his henchmen to justice after the war. But none of these histories intrigued and haunted me like The Ratline. It will surely stick with you too.
Any thinking American will also be compelled by this book to consider our own nation’s war crimes during our lifetimes – and how none of these perpetrators have ever been forced to legally account for themselves. The torching of innocent men, women and children; the illegal wars; the assassinations; the torture. U.S. officials have their own dark records – and they all scurried free on their own ratlines without ever having to leave their own country.
But that’s another column and another book. I’ve already ordered Nicholson Baker’s Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. Baker is one if the few contemporary American authors who is properly disturbed by our own country. As David Bowie once sang, “I’m afraid of America… I’m afraid I can’t help it.”
Otto von Wachter