My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands (Rating 5) – Family, Fanaticism, and Flight. Having myself written stories and novels centered on WWII (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was eager to read The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands. The author’s grandfather, a Jew, narrowly escaped death during the Holocaust. My own curiosity took a deeply personal turn when I read in the Introduction that Otto Wachter, the book’s subject, was the SS Officer who ordered the extermination of the entire Jewish population of the Polish city of Lemberg, the birthplace of Sands’s grandfather. My maternal grandparents, who came to America in the early 1900s, were also from Lemberg (then called Lvov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; known as Lviv under Russian control). My grandmother’s sister (my great aunt) along with her husband, children, and grandchildren were among those Wachter sent to their deaths. So Sands’s quest became mine. The Ratline is actually three stories in one. The first narrative is a family saga about the love between Otto and his wife Charlotte, who shared his virulent antisemitism and turned a blind eye to its extremism; and the loyal attempts of their fourth child Horst, who barely knew his father but feels duty-bound to defend and find good in the man. Horst insists in the face of irrefutable evidence that his father was a humane administrator of civilian life, who had nothing to do with the Nazi death camps. Second, the book is a Nazi atrocity story about a man whose name deserves to be as well known as more familiar ones, like Himmler. The extent to which Wachter, a fanatic anti-Semite, was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands is laid out in chilling detail, supported by documents and photos. While the Holocaust is the best known material in the book, it never ceases to horrify. Third, Sands tells a postwar story of Vatican and U.S. collaboration to aid the flight of Nazi war criminals to Argentina, or elsewhere, via the Ratline of the title. This tale was the most eye-opening for me. Driven by their shared animosity for Russia and communism, the Church and the CIA ignored Nazi atrocities in exchange for information on their Cold War enemy. Rare is the source interviewed by Sands who admits this assistance was motivated by hatred for the Jews as much as for the Reds. I doubt this disgrace will ever be fully acknowledged or held to account, but Sands has written a remarkable book that will sear its record into readers’ minds and hearts. Deftly integrating storytelling and facts, The Ratline is a valuable and unique addition to Holocaust literature.
