Nazis on the Run

Nazis on the Run
Author: Gerald Steinacher
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191653772

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.

The Nazis Next Door

The Nazis Next Door
Author: Eric Lichtblau
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0547669224

A Newsweek Best Book of the Year: “Captivating . . . rooted in first-rate research” (The New York Times Book Review). In this New York Times bestseller, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the US government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. Now, relying on a trove of newly disclosed documents and scores of interviews, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau reveals this little-known and “disturbing” chapter of postwar history (Salon).

The Ratline

The Ratline
Author: Philippe Sands
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525562532

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.

On the Run in Nazi Berlin

On the Run in Nazi Berlin
Author: Bert Lewyn
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1641601132

BERLIN, 1942. The Gestapo arrest eighteen-year-old Bert Lewyn and his parents, sending the latter to their deaths and Bert to work in a factory making guns for the Nazi war effort. Miraculously tipped off the morning the Gestapo round up all the Jews who work in the factories, Bert goes underground. He finds shelter sometimes with compassionate civilians, sometimes with people who find his skills useful and sometimes in the cellars of bombed-out buildings. Without proper identity papers, he survives as a hunted Jew in the flames and terror of Nazi Berlin in part by successfully mimicking non-Jews, even masquerading as an SS officer. But the Gestapo are hot on his trail... Before World War II, 160,000 Jews lived in Berlin. By 1945, only 3,000 remained alive. Bert was one of the few, and his thrilling memoir—from witnessing the famous 1933 book burning to the aftermath of the war in a displaced persons camp—offers an unparalleled depiction of the life of a runaway Jew caught in the heart of the Nazi empire.

The Passenger

The Passenger
Author: Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250317150

A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FOR THE GUARDIAN * FINANCIAL TIMES * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE * THE TIMES Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train. And then another. And another . . . until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. His travels bring him face-to-face with waiters and conductors, officials and fellow outcasts, seductive women and vicious thieves, a few of whom disapprove of the regime while the rest embrace it wholeheartedly. Clinging to his existence as it was just days before, Silbermann refuses to believe what is happening even as he is beset by opportunists, betrayed by associates, and bereft of family, friends, and fortune. As his world collapses around him, he is forced to concede that his nightmare is all too real. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.

Nazis on the Run

Nazis on the Run
Author: Gerald Steinacher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199642451

« The story of how Nazi war criminals fled justice after Second World War-and the role played by the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Secret Services of the great powers in helping them get away. »--

Living with the Enemy

Living with the Enemy
Author: Freddie Knoller
Publisher: Metro Publishing, Limited
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781843581420

'I felt ashamed that my mind was working against my friends in this way, but I also knew that in order to survive it was necessary to think like the Nazi conquerors among whom I lived, to remove myself as far as possible from the people they hated; in fact, to remove myself from myself.' Freddie Knoller was forced to abandon his family and flee Vienna as Nazi Brownshirts swept through his apartment building in November 1938. Little more than a ordinary Jewish schoolboy, his desperate journey took him, among many other places, to Paris, where he earned a living guiding the Nazis around the red light district, an occupation that provoked complex feelings of guilt, elation and fortune. But his luck ran out, and Freddie was soon on the run again before he fell victim to a friend's betrayal that saw him transported straight to Auschwitz.

The Nazi's Granddaughter

The Nazi's Granddaughter
Author: Silvia Foti
Publisher: Regnery History
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684511089

Hero–or Nazi? Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.

Racial Hygiene

Racial Hygiene
Author: Robert Proctor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674745780

This book focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Proctor demonstrates that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.

We Germans

We Germans
Author: Alexander Starritt
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316429791

WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE A letter from a German soldier to his grandson recounts the terrors of war on the Eastern Front, and a postwar ordinary life in search of atonement, in this “raw, visceral, and propulsive” novel (New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator, and the difficulty of life after war. Found among his effects after his death, the letter is at once a thrilling story of adventure and a questing rumination on the moral ambiguity of war. In his years spent fighting the Russians and attempting afterward to survive the Gulag, Meissner recounts a life lived in perseverance and atonement. Wracked with shame—both for himself and for Germany—the grandfather explains his dark rationale, exults in the courage of others, and blurs the boundaries of right and wrong. We Germans complicates our most steadfast beliefs and seeks to account for the complicity of an entire country in the perpetration of heinous acts. In this breathless and page-turning story, Alexander Starritt also presents us with a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one's own life at the cost of the lives of others and asks whether we can ever truly atone.