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THE BUCHENWALD REPORT

An invaluable report by US Army personnel assembled immediately after liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. This vast project, undertaken by German-speaking members of the Army's Psychological Warfare Division, somehow lay unpublished for 50 years. One faded carbon copy turned up, allowing Hackett (History/Univ. of Texas, El Paso) the opportunity to translate and edit the Army interview team's findings and testimonies. Part I, the main report, is a formal presentation of the camp's history, organization, operation, inmate population and treatment; some of the most incriminating data is from Buchenwald's own administrative files. The second part consists of individual reports, imprecise but impressive, written by some of the more lucid of the 21,000 survivors. Because the reportage is the work of soldiers rather than journalists, some revealing opinions slip through: The skeletal survivors, one report candidly notes, ``are brutalized, unpleasant to look on. It is easy to adopt the Nazi theory that [the victims] are subhuman, for many have in fact been deprived of their humanity.'' While much of the recorded mass murder involves Jews from a half dozen nations, there is documentation here of the mistreatment of homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Allied prisoners of war, and anti-fascists. More moving than the lists of victims are the detailed descriptions of elaborate tortures of individuals: One gypsy was placed in a tiny wooden crate with driven nails to meet his slightest movement, while Jewish laborers were forced to bury two of their colleagues alive. Significant chapters cover medical experimentation on humans, the treatment of children, the record of resistance and sabotage, and the poswar trials of key Nazis who operated in Buchenwald. This is an essential document of WW II and Holocaust history. (maps, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; History Book Club featured selection)

Pub Date: April 11, 1995

ISBN: 0-8133-1777-0

Page Count: 444

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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