An engrossing academic taxonomy of evil.
A measured yet chilling overview of the organization and politics of Nazi Germany’s notorious core.
Dams (Police Sciences/North-Rhine Westphalia School of Public Management) and Stolle (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) offer a rigorously researched account that’s familiar in its broad strokes, but their focus on the words and career arcs of key perpetrators, and the Gestapo’s paper trail, illuminates disturbing new facets. The Gestapo (from Geheime Staatspolizei, or “Secret State Police”) was essentially created by Heinrich Himmler (who would commit suicide in Allied custody) and his ruthless deputy Reinhard Heydrich (assassinated by partisans in 1942), and its aggression was forged by competition for influence with other factions like the army: “The first Gestapo Law…meant that the Gestapo was largely detached from the interior administration.” Prior to World War II, Himmler focused on restructuring domestic policing “according to National Socialist principles,” persecuting Jews, homosexuals, the “work-shy” and other enemies of the state. After 1939, Gestapo units generally followed the army’s movement into Europe. The authors emphasize how bureaucratic complexity was promulgated at every level of the Gestapo’s operation. Somehow, this eased the transition from domestic spying to active participation in genocide, initially in Eastern Europe, where they oversaw the infamous mobile killing squads. This transition from abstract clerical management “turned the officers into active enforcers of the National Socialist war of extermination…[which] then became perceptible in their service on the ‘home front.’ ” Dams and Stolle are restrained in their detailing of the accelerating narrative of mass murder and cruelty, but their emphasis on Nazi philosophy and ambition remains disturbing, as is their conclusion, where they document how initial efforts to hold Gestapo members accountable tapered off by the early 1950s—“heavily incriminated war criminals found jobs” in intelligence and other fields.
An engrossing academic taxonomy of evil.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-966921-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | 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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