Revisionist judgments spoil an otherwise deftly written, compelling story.
A disturbing tale of mob violence in wartime Germany.
The citizens of Russelsheim were subjected to a deadly bombing by the Royal Air Force on August 26, 1944. As the townsfolk were clearing their rubble-strewn streets, Luftwaffe soldiers marched through with eight American airmen captured two days before the assault. Mistaking the airmen for “Canadians” rumored to be responsible for the bombing, a quickly growing and violent crowd screamed for vengeance. The Luftwaffe guards finally gave way, and Nigro (English/Kutztown Univ.) describes in chilling detail how the Americans were beaten to death with stones, pipes, and wooden planks. Later, local Nazi bigwig Josef Hartgen began to shoot in the head those still alive. A second air raid prevented their immediate burial, and seven months later, on the heels of the US Third Army’s advance, an investigation by Lt. Colonel Leon Jaworski (later of Watergate fame) led to the conviction and execution of seven of the eleven who were brought to trial. Incredibly, two of the eight airmen had survived, though this fact came to light only at the war’s end. Nigro leaves the intriguing story of their escape undeveloped, also neglecting the US Army’s failure to locate them and use their testimony to bring more Germans to justice. He concentrates instead on the plight of the German civilians and at times seems to be apologizing for them. Nigro depicts the massacre as inevitable, with Russelsheim embodying its corporate symbol, the wolfsangel (wolf trap), and catching both townsfolk and airmen in its deadly grasp. Even if the Allied bombings were as inhumane and unjustified as the author suggests, they hardly excuse a mass lynching. And the depiction of Russelsheimers as brutalized by the Nazi regime is belied by the fact that the town unhesitatingly used forced foreign labor to produce war materiel and that, of the 49 Jews resident in Russelsheim in 1939, none remains today.
Revisionist judgments spoil an otherwise deftly written, compelling story.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57488-245-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
HISTORY | 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 Yorker staff 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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