History with the panache of a Howard Hawks war movie.
How the most notorious Nazi war criminals were caught and made to pay for their crimes.
Most World War II histories deal with the tragedies that caused the war and the heroism that ended it. This book showcases the smarts that Allied sleuths employed to capture and punish the Nazi fugitives behind the war’s worst atrocities and the sometimes-farcical ruses their nemeses employed trying to escape justice. Lachman, the author of six books and the executive producer of Inside Edition, follows dozens of threads in the environs of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and the Austrian Alps in the spring and summer of 1945 as the Red Army closed in from the east and Allied forces encroached from the west. It was a race against time to make the Nazis face the consequences of their villainy before they could end their own lives. As Lachman writes, “These are days of reckoning for Nazi kingpins placed in supreme positions of power by Hitler who now choose death over a war crimes trial, or the torment of their consciences.” Readers get a close-up view of the last moments of not only Hitler and his bride of mere hours, Eva Braun, but also his most loyal henchmen in the Führerbunker, two flights below the street, plotting their suicides and the future of a Germany without Hitler. The author gives us glimpses of reprehensible Nazis like Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, and their families and hangers-on as they switch identities and sneak underground, desperately trying to blend in with their fellow Germans in defeat. We also follow the extraordinary men, including many American-, British-, and German-born Jews, who were tasked with chasing down the regime’s most wanted, and we witness their often frightening but ultimately satisfying face-to-face encounters with real-life monsters.
History with the panache of a Howard Hawks war movie.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9798895151068
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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