Download or read book The Ratline written by Philippe Sands and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street. "Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le Carré, internationally renowned bestselling author Baron Otto von Wächter, a lawyer, husband, and father, was also a senior SS officer and war criminal, indicted for the murder of more than a hundred thousand Poles and Jews. Although he was given a new identity and life via “the Ratline” to Argentina, the escape route taken by thousands of other Nazis, Wächter and his plan were cut short by his mysterious, shocking death in Rome. In the midst of the burgeoning Cold War, was he being recruited by the Americans or by the Soviets—or perhaps both? Or was he poisoned by one side or the other, as his son believes—or by both? With the cooperation of Wächter’s son Horst, who believes his father to have been “a good man,” award-winning author Philippe Sands draws on a trove of family correspondence to piece together Wächter’s extraordinary life before and during the war, his years evading justice, and his sudden, puzzling death. A riveting work of history, The Ratline is part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, and part Cold War espionage thriller.
Download or read book Ratline written by Peter Levenda and published by Ibis Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ratline is the documented history about the mechanisms by which thousands of other Nazi war criminals fled to the remotest parts of the globe--including quite possibly Adolf Hitler. It is a story involving Soviet spies, Nazi priests, and a network of Catholic monasteries and safe houses known as the rat line. The name of one priest in particular, Monsignor Draganovic, was discovered by the author in a diary found in Indonesia. Why would this name turn up in a document written in a spidery German hand in a remote island in Indonesia? As famed author Peter Levenda began his research, more information came to light: In December of 2009, it was revealed that the skull the Russians claimed was Hitler's--salvaged from the bunker in 1945--was not that of Hitler! In 2010, files from the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department were declassified, revealing a history of American intelligence providing cover for Nazi war criminals. The mystery deepened, and the author returned to his own roots hunting Nazis in North America, South America and Europe. He revisited old contacts, made some new ones, and gradually the explosive story was revealed: there is no forensic evidence to prove that Adolf Hitler died in the bunker in April 1945!
Download or read book Vatican Ratline written by Mauri and published by Booksurge Publishing. This book was released on 2006-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vatican Ratline is the true story of recovered memories of one survivor of the post World War II ratline interwoven with the history of the players. It exposes why we are seeing a return to the Middles Ages, the crusades, the inquisition, the slave trade, constant war and the conquering of nations. It looks at the Jesuits, the soldiers of the Pope, who are leading the brigade, with the Nazi run CIA as Grand Inquisitor. The twentieth century 'grey' Nazi collaborator is investigated with his disk shaped flying machine. This is the story of the best holocaust money can buy as science turns an evil eye toward the destruction of the planet, by the military, and its inhabitants by stealing their souls using torture and mind control.
Download or read book Ratlines written by M ; Loftus J. Aarons and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ratlines written by Stuart Neville and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ireland 1963. As the Irish people prepare to welcome President John F. Kennedy to the land of his ancestors, a German national is murdered in a seaside guesthouse. Lieutenant Albert Ryan, Directorate of Intelligence, is ordered to investigate. The German is the third foreigner to die within a few days, and Minister for Justice Charles Haughey wants the killing to end lest a shameful secret be exposed: the dead men were all Nazis granted asylum by the Irish government in the years following World War II. A note from the killers is found on the dead German's corpse, addressed to Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Hitler's favorite commando, once called the most dangerous man in Europe. The note simply says: "We are coming for you." As Albert Ryan digs deeper into the case he discovers a network of former Nazis and collaborators, all presided over by Skorzeny from his country estate outside Dublin. When Ryan closes in on the killers, his loyalty is torn between country and conscience. Why must he protect the very people he fought against twenty years before? Ryan learns that Skorzeny might be a dangerous ally, but he is a deadly enemy.
Download or read book East West Street written by Philippe Sands and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound, important book, a moving personal detective story and an uncovering of secret pasts, set in Europe’s center, the city of bright colors—Lviv, Ukraine, dividing east from west, north from south, in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. This is “a monumental achievement ... told with love, anger and precision” (John le Carré, acclaimed internationally bestselling author). East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in “the Paris of Ukraine,” a major cultural center of Europe, a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. Phillipe Sands changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder
Download or read book Soldiers Spies and the Rat Line written by James Milano and published by Potomac Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Germany's surrender in World War II, Jim Milano, a young U.S. army intelligence officer, led a small, independent group of soldiers charged with carrying out some of the first intelligence efforts of the postwar era. Inventing the techniques of Cold War espionage for themselves and improvising unorthodox methods, the major and his creative cohorts confounded Soviet forces and created escape routes for defectors. In the pages of Milano's fascinating memoir you'll find the shadowy world populated by spies, prostitutes, refugees, scoundrels, and heroes comes alive.
Download or read book Nazis on the Run written by Gerald Steinacher and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of how Nazi war criminals escaped from justice at the end of the Second World War by fleeing through the Tyrolean Alps to Italian seaports, and the role played by the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Secret Services of the major powers in smuggling them away from prosecution in Europe to a new life in South America. The Nazi sympathies held by groups and individuals within these organizations evolved into a successful assistance network for fugitive criminals, providing them not only with secret escape routes but hiding places for their loot. Gerald Steinacher skillfully traces the complex escape stories of some of the most prominent Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, showing how they mingled and blended with thousands of technically stateless or displaced persons, all flooding across the Alps to Italy and from there, to destinations abroad. The story of their escape shows clearly just how difficult the apprehending of war criminals can be. As Steinacher shows, all the major countries in the post-war world had 'mixed motives' for their actions, ranging from the shortage of trained intelligence personnel in the immediate aftermath of the war to the emerging East-West confrontation after 1947, which led to many former Nazis being recruited as agents turned in the Cold War.
Download or read book Warburg in Rome written by James Carroll and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In post-WWII Italy, an American uncovers a Vatican scandal in a “thriller with deeply serious historical undertones” by a National Book Award winner (Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered). David Warburg, newly minted director of the US War Refugee Board, arrives in Rome at war’s end, determined to bring aid to the destitute European Jews streaming into the city. Marguerite d’Erasmo, a French-Italian Red Cross worker with a shadowed past, is initially Warburg’s guide—while a charismatic young American Catholic priest, Monsignor Kevin Deane, seems equally committed to aiding Italian Jews. But the city is a labyrinth of desperate fugitives: runaway Nazis, Jewish resisters, and criminal Church figures. Marguerite, caught between justice and revenge, is forced to play a double game. At the center of the maze, Warburg discovers one of history’s great scandals: the Vatican ratline, a clandestine escape route maintained by Church officials and providing scores of Nazi war criminals with secret passage to South America. Turning to American intelligence officials, he learns that the dark secret is not as secret as he thought—and that even those he trusts may betray him—in this “complex and compelling novel of the Vatican and morality during World War II” (Library Journal). Warburg in Rome has “the breathtaking pace of a thriller and the gravitas of a genuine moral center—as if John LeCarré and Graham Greene collaborated” (Mary Gordon). “A high-stakes battle between good and evil [and] a plot full of twists and turns.” —The Boston Globe “A suspenseful historical drama set in Rome at the end of WWII and centering on Vatican complicity in the flight of Nazi fugitives to Argentina.” —Publishers Weekly “Recommend this utterly engaging thriller to fans of Joseph Kanon’s The Good German and James R. Benn’s Death’s Door.” —Booklist, starred review
Download or read book Endpapers written by Alexander Wolff and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerfully told story of family, honor, love, and truth . . . the beautiful and haunting stories told in this book transcend policy and politics.” —Beto O’Rourke A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. After fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.
Download or read book Children of Nazis written by Tania Crasnianski and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fascinating Story of Eight Children of Third Reich Leaders and their Journey from Descendants of Heroes to Descendants of Criminals In 1940, the German sons and daughters of great Nazi dignitaries Himmler, Göring, Hess, Frank, Bormann, Höss, Speer, and Mengele were children of privilege at four, five, or ten years old, surrounded by affectionate, all-powerful parents. Although innocent and unaware of what was happening at the time, they eventually discovered the extent of their father's occupations: These men—their fathers who were capable of loving their children and receiving love in return—were leaders of the Third Reich, and would later be convicted as monstrous war criminals. For these children, the German defeat was an earth-shattering source of family rupture, the end of opulence, and the jarring discovery of Hitler's atrocities. How did the offspring of these leaders deal with the aftermath of the war and the skeletons that would haunt them forever? Some chose to disown their past. Others did not. Some condemned their fathers; others worshiped them unconditionally to the end. In this enlightening book, which has been translated into eleven languages, Tania Crasnianski examines the responsibility of eight descendants of Nazi notables, caught somewhere between stigmatization, worship, and amnesia. By tracing the unique experiences of these children, she probes at the relationship between them and their fathers and examines the idea of how responsibility for the fault is continually borne by the descendants.
Download or read book Radical Evil on Trial written by Carlos Santiago Nino and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does an emergent democracy have an obligation to prosecute its former dictators for crimes against humanity—for what Arendt and Kant called "radical evil"? What impact will such prosecutions have on the future of democracy? In this book, Carlos Santiago Nino offers a provocative first-hand analysis of developments in Argentina during the 1980s, when a brutal military dictatorship gave way to a democratic government. Nino played a key role in guiding the transition to democracy and in shaping the human rights policies of President Ra�l Alfons�n after the fall of the military junta in 1983. The centerpiece of Alfons�n's human rights program was the trial held in a federal court in Buenos Aires in 1985, which resulted in the convictions of five of the leading members of the junta that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. Placing the Argentine experience in the context of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, Tokyo, and elsewhere, Nino examines the broader questions raised by human rights trials. He considers their political repercussions and their potential for strengthening the new democratic government. He explains why prosecutions for human rights violations should be grounded on a theory of the criminal law that emphasizes the preventive rather than retributive functions of punishment. Nino rejects the obligation to punish perpetrators of radical evil and argues instead for a more forward-looking duty—to safeguard democracy. This, he believes, is what ultimately justified the Argentine trials and should be the focus of any international action.
Download or read book Lawless World written by Philippe Sands and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hunting Eichmann written by Neal Bascomb and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the intrigue of a detective story, "Hunting Eichmann" follows the Nazi as he escapes two American POW camps, hides in the mountains, and builds an anonymous life in Buenos Aires, before finally being captured and brought to trial.
Download or read book The Western Wind written by Samantha Harvey and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Staunch Book Prize. “A beautifully written and expertly structured medieval mystery packed with intrigue, drama and shock revelations.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune An extraordinary new novel by Samantha Harvey—whose books have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), and the Guardian First Book Award—The Western Wind is a riveting story of faith, guilt, and the freedom of confession. It’s 1491. In the small village of Oakham, its wealthiest and most industrious resident, Tom Newman, is swept away by the river during the early hours of Shrove Saturday. Was it murder, suicide, or an accident? Narrated from the perspective of local priest John Reve—patient shepherd to his wayward flock—a shadowy portrait of the community comes to light through its residents’ tortured revelations. As some of their darkest secrets are revealed, the intrigue of the unexplained death ripples through the congregation. But will Reve, a man with secrets of his own, discover what happened to Newman? And what will happen if he can’t? Written with timeless eloquence, steeped in the spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages, and brimming with propulsive suspense, The Western Wind finds Samantha Harvey at the pinnacle of her outstanding novelistic power. “Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient . . . a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets.” —The New York Times Book Review “Ms. Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities.” —The Wall Street Journal “Brings medieval England back to life.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book The Ruin of All Witches written by Malcolm Gaskill and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology. “The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place…Thought-provoking and absorbing." —Hilary Mantel, best-selling author of Wolf Hall In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, and people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. A woman is seen wading through the swamp like a lost soul. Disturbing dreams and visions proliferate. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment and denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, and his troubled wife, Mary. Drawing on rich, previously unexplored source material, Malcolm Gaskill vividly evokes a strange past, one where lives were steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in omens, curses and enchantments. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition and enlightenment, tradition and innovation.
Download or read book Promise Me You ll Shoot Yourself written by Florian Huber and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best History Book of 2019 by The Times (UK) The astounding true story of how thousands of ordinary Germans, overcome by shame, guilt, and fear, killed themselves after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II. By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death -- for themselves and for their children. "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" recounts this little-known mass event. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian Florian Huber traces the euphoria of many ordinary Germans as Hitler restored national pride; their indifference as the Führer's political enemies, Jews, and other minorities began to suffer; and the descent into despair as the war took its terrible toll, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Above all, he investigates how suicide became a contagious epidemic as the country collapsed. Drawing on eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" presents a riveting portrait of a nation in crisis, and sheds light on a dramatic yet largely unknown episode of postwar Germany.
