Infuriated by the ousting of Mussolini in July 1943, Hitler ordered his minions to plan and execute the kidnapping of Pope Pius XII and the plundering of the Vatican’s treasures.
Kurzman, who specializes in war and disaster (No Greater Glory, 2004, etc.), believes he has found the key to understanding Pius XII’s reluctance to condemn the Holocaust. Although no official Nazi documents have emerged to confirm the story, numerous interviews of the principals leave little doubt that Pius XII was concerned that his active opposition to the Germans would seriously threaten the Church (especially in Germany), the Vatican and his life. Although Kurzman does not specify when he conducted his interviews, he mentions them frequently, especially key ones with SS General Karl Wolff, a man whose hands dripped Holocaust gore, but who nonetheless recognized the folly of Hitler’s seize-the-Vatican order and who realized that Germany was going to lose the war and was hoping to accommodate himself to the ensuing new world order. He initially hoped to broker a separate peace—to convince the Allies (the Western ones) to focus on the Soviets, whose post-war imperial designs were evident. That initiative went nowhere, but Wolff did surrender the entire German army in Italy two days after Hitler’s suicide. The author at times relates this story in a sort of breathless prose (using exclamation points in case we miss the urgency), and he seems oddly hesitant to denounce outright Pius XII’s behavior (including his failure to speak out when the Nazis rounded up the Jews of Rome and shipped them to Auschwitz), leaving that job to other historians whose judgments he records. Of greatest interest is Wolff’s delicate dance: appeasing the ever-impatient, impulsive and dangerous Hitler; finessing the frightened Pope; protecting himself and his family.
A little-known tale whose significance the author trumpets a bit too brassily.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81468-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
