A fairly technical study featuring some riveting revelations about the diverse makeup of the notorious Nazi organization.
An in-depth examination of the elite group of soldiers originally designed as Hitler’s bodyguards and carefully groomed and trained by Heinrich Himmler for murderous duty.
British military historian and broadcaster Gilbert (Challenge of Battle: The Real Story of the British Army in 1914, 2014, etc.) offers a nuts-and-bolts, chronological study of the Waffen-SS, from the time of Himmler’s assumption of its command in 1929 through training, successes, atrocities on the Eastern and Western fronts, and to its bitter defeat in 1945 (and resurrection in a postwar loyalists’ group). After Hitler’s elimination of Ernst Röhm and his thuggish SA (the “brownshirts”) in the so-called Night of the Long Knives on June 29, 1934, the elite Schutzstaffel became the “prime arbiter of violence in Nazi Germany.” Himmler envisioned a group with “a confirmed Aryan pedigree and a high level of physical fitness”—education was not a priority—forged into “a vanguard of political soldiers for the Nazi cause.” Of course, the men would be inculcated in racial doctrine and develop an intense sense of comradeship. Gilbert explores the competitive dynamic between the Germany army and the SS and the army’s attempts to undermine the SS and its various splinter groups. While Himmler pursued his vision of an ever larger role for the SS—as the racial war against the Jews and Slavs progressed—Hitler “did not favor diluting its special character through mass recruitment.” As Nazi expansion continued, so did the widening makeup of the SS, and the group began to incorporate mercenary Dutch, Finns, Norwegians, and Danes. With the Germans increasingly desperate, “the once fixed racial lines were also becoming…blurred, something not lost on bemused Waffen-SS veterans.” Ultimately, the organization fought until the bitter end. Of the “more than 900,000 men [who] passed through its ranks,” writes Gilbert, “...300,000 were killed or died of their wounds.”
A fairly technical study featuring some riveting revelations about the diverse makeup of the notorious Nazi organization.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-82465-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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