A useful addition to the English-language literature of the Nazi era.
An intriguing study of a plot against Adolf Hitler that might have spared Europe the horror of WWII.
Though the Osterfrage has been of much interest to recent German historians, it has received little attention elsewhere. It’s a surprising neglect, since the story offers compelling real-life examples of byzantine variables and countless what-if possibilities. Had England’s Lord Halifax been more vigorous in opposing Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, had the German army followed its instincts against fighting a two-front war, and had a small group of conspirators succeeded in ousting the Führer before the invasion of Czechoslovakia—well, the world would have been a different place. After Hitler consolidated power within Germany, resistance to his rule was forced underground; surprisingly, however, one of its most potent centers was in the Abwehr, the all-services counterintelligence unit under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The admiral’s deputy, army colonel Hans Oster, organized a broad conspiracy among the officer class, which among other things resented Hitler’s rise from the ranks and his inability to understand war beyond an infantryman’s perspective. Complicating this plot to assassinate Hitler were the interminable negotiations between the Nazi regime and the British government over the fate of the Sudetenland. The English were well aware of Oster’s movement, for he had told British military intelligence of his plans, but they did nothing to help him. The attempted coup failed, though Oster managed to evade detection until very late in WWII—so late, writes Parssinen (History/Univ. of Tampa), that as he awaited hanging he “might have heard the guns of the approaching American armies.” Of particular interest is the author’s enumeration of other plots by the German military to depose Hitler during the war, of which only the 1944 bombing attempt by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg is well known.
A useful addition to the English-language literature of the Nazi era.Pub Date: April 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019587-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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