The Ratline

Starred review from November 23, 2020
The past,” William Faulkner sternly warned, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” His admonition is at the unarticulated narrative heart of this solemn, graceful, and powerful account by lawyer and historian Sands (East West Street). The sins, lies, and
rationalizations of mothers and fathers who supported the Nazi regime, Sands makes uncomfortably clear, are massive burdens that weigh down the lives of the generations that follow. And for the descendants of those who suffered monstrously as the Final Solution goose-stepped its way across Europe, the martyrdom of their ancestors is a heavy knowledge, too; it is an armory of suppressed rage. For the children of both the murderers and the murdered, there is no escape., The tale is set in motion by a single ambition: to discover what happened to Otto Wächter, the SS governor of the occupied city in Galicia where Sands’s grandfather lived. On a tenacious journey, part hands-on investigation, part rumination, across Europe and on to America, Sands interviews a wide-ranging collection of fascinating characters to find answers (there is even a brief walk-on role for his neighbor, John le Carré)., Yet it would be a mistake to think of this rich, compulsively readable book as simply a treatise on the virulent scars etched deep by the Third Reich and its all-too-eager cohorts. Its rewards are many, and many-faceted. It is also a far-reaching whodunit into a mysterious death, where even the dead ends are engaging; a wartime love story between a high-ranking SS official and his ambitious wife (and a subtly corrosive portrait of their bewildering and criminal delusions as they enjoy their gilded life); a story of a son who desperately struggles in spite of condemning evidence “to find the good things” in his deeply flawed parents; an infuriating spotlight on cynically pragmatic ties between American spymasters, the Vatican, and Nazi war criminals; and, in a revelation that blindsides the reader, a resourceful probing into buried familial ties that reveal, as Sands writes in his carefully controlled prose, “the curiosity of life, the strange and unexpected points of connection.”, Throughout, Sands is a reliable narrator—gracious, wise, and intrepid. And at its very end, the long odyssey culminates in the book’s final sentence, an unequivocal declaration by Wächter’s granddaughter, a headscarf-wearing Muslim convert: “My grandfather was a mass murderer.” Her searing acknowledgment will resonate long after the reader turns the last page of this remarkable chronicle. (Feb.), Howard Blum is the author of Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America and, most recently, Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.

November 15, 2020
A biography of a little-known but major 20th-century war criminal. Lawyer and historian Sands tells the fascinating, disturbing story of Otto W�chter (1901-1949), a high-ranking official in the SS. In 2012, while researching the Holocaust in Ukraine, the author learned that W�chter's son, Horst (b. 1939), was still alive. Since his father served as Nazi governor of Ukraine from 1942 to 1944, where he supervised the murders of Jews and other Soviet civilians, Sands sought a meeting. Although convinced that his father was a "good Nazi," Horst maintained a close friendship with the author for years, meeting many times and allowing access to a massive trove of family correspondence, journals, and photographs. Born in Austria, W�chter entered the University of Vienna in 1919. He became a member of the fiercely anti-Semitic, pan-German Deutsche Klub and participated in violent anti-Semitic demonstrations. An "early supporter of Adolf Hitler," he joined the Austrian National Socialist Party in 1923. A prominent Austrian Nazi by the 1930s, he fled to Germany in 1934 after an unsuccessful coup. Welcomed into the SS, he returned to Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss. During the war, he served in several top-level positions but made his mark in Ukraine. After Germany's surrender in 1945, he disappeared. This event doesn't occur until 130 pages into the narrative, but readers will not complain. Adding Horst's archives to extensive interviews allows Sands to deliver a gripping account of Otto's experience. For three years, he lived in an Alpine cabin supplied by his wife and friendly locals. Then, to escape discovery, he joined the "Ratline," a route used by Nazis to flee to South America. When he arrived in Rome, sympathetic monks provided him with a small room. After less than three months, before he could acquire money and documents for immigration, he fell ill and died. The list of principal characters is helpful. A detailed, well-constructed biography of a Nazi mass murderer and his escape from justice.

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January 1, 2021

Human rights attorney Sands (East West Street) offers a real-life thriller that is stranger than fiction. Otto von W�chter (1901-49) was an Austrian senior Nazi official who became governor of Krak�w, was involved in the assassination of an Austrian chancellor, and was complicit in the mass genocide of Jews. Indicted for mass murder, he vanished in 1945. In an attempt to clear his father's name, and to shed light on his father's mysterious death in 1949, von W�chter's youngest son, Horst W�chter, made available 10,000 family documents to the author, including letters and diaries. Sands uses these documents, supplemented with firsthand interviews, to tell the story of what happened to von W�chter after his disappearance, which includes fleeing to the high Austrian Alps and receiving assistance from both an alpinist SS soldier and a bishop from the Vatican. Sands also sheds light on the ratline, secret channels that helped Nazi refugees flee and evade capture. A cast of characters at the beginning of the book, along with photographs, illustrations, and maps throughout, give context to the historical details. VERDICT Full of twists and turns, cover-ups and complicity, this gripping historical thrill ride will appeal to fans of John le Carr�.--David Miller, Farmville P.L., NC

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 8, 2021
Since the end of WWII, historians and the general public have been endlessly fascinated by Nazis. The latest peek into Nazism's dark world is this biography of Otto W�chter and his wife, Charlotte. The Austro Hungarian-born W�chter was raised in a virulently anti-Semitic family, a prejudice Charlotte shared, and the politically active Otto found common cause with the rising Nazi Party. Through the course of WWII, W�chter gained more responsibility and prominence until, at war's end, he was considered a major war criminal, on the run from the Nuremberg tribunal. W�chter was never caught, hiding first in the Alps, then in Rome, until dying from an unknown illness in 1949. Sands spends more time and scholarship on W�chter's postwar life as a fugitive and (rumored) murder victim than his career as a Nazi official. There's no question that Sands is a superlative historical researcher and excellent writer, but, ultimately, W�chter's career as a Nazi was unremarkable, and his postwar life and death of interest mostly to detail-obsessive academic historians specializing in Nazism.

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