A rigorously documented, essential work not only about Eichmann’s masterly masquerade, but also about how we come to accept...
A riveting reconstruction of a fanatical National Socialist’s obdurate journey in exile and appalling second career in Argentina.
Delving into a body of interviews Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) made with pro-Nazi Dutch war propagandist Willem Sassen in Argentina in the late 1950s, German historian Stangneth reveals the chilling mindset of the unrepentant Nazi, later carefully disguised at his trial in Israel. Eichmann’s Argentine writings and interviews were not available to Hannah Arendt when she wrote her brilliant Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In it, she portrays the wretched former SS colonel on trial for his life in 1961 as “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine” (his self-description), with none of the terrifying look of evil that an efficient engineer of the Final Solution should have displayed. Stangneth meticulously reveals how Eichmann was able to fool everyone, employing a cunning mixture of self-aggrandizement and opportunism, even during his early SS career in Austria when he was put in charge of Jewish affairs and was known as the “Czar of the Jews.” Eichmann was proud of being a man of importance, and at the end of the war, he reluctantly had to disguise himself among other displaced persons, eluding Allied capture and living for several years incognito in northern Germany as a chicken farmer. Successfully floating rumors that he had taken up with the Palestinian mufti, he threw Nazi hunters off his trail, and he was able to flee to Argentina effortlessly and with the aid of a ferocious coterie of exiled Nazis comfortably ensconced there. Stangneth masterfully sifts through the information from these lively social gatherings conducted at journalist Sassen’s home three years before Eichmann’s kidnapping by Israeli agents.
A rigorously documented, essential work not only about Eichmann’s masterly masquerade, but also about how we come to accept appearances as truth.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95967-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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