An illuminating examination of a little-known aspect of World War II.
A sobering study of the collapse of the Third Reich and the wave of suicides that accompanied its fall.
Hitler famously shot himself rather than fall into the hands of the Red Army, and many of his closest associates—e.g., Joseph Goebbels and his entire family—followed suit. So, too, writes German historian and documentary filmmaker Huber, did countless “ordinary” Germans, whether out of simple despair or certainty that the crimes of the Nazi regime would be laid at their door. The wave of suicide began earlier than 1945; the author quotes a schoolteacher who wrote after the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, “the first and last cause of my despair is the hopelessness of victory.” Still, beginning in the spring of 1945, as Huber grimly documents, “large quantities of cyanide and prussic acid were circulating in Germany, in response to an explosion in demand.” The Nazi regime began to suppress the statistics related to suicide lest they prompt even more destruction. Drawing on existing records, Huber reckons that in Berlin alone, the suicide rate was five times higher than “normal” in April 1945, when the city fell. The victorious Allies were surprised to find among civilian survivors a kind of orderliness and calm—though, as the author notes, many soldiers who had lived through combat were more inclined to withdraw into themselves, none quite “ready for reality.” The subtitle of the book is a touch too narrow. The author not only covers suicides, but also those who defiantly refused either to kill themselves or to acknowledge any wrongdoing, such as a Nazi official who disputed the right of a German court to judge her actions in wartime, seeing them “as henchmen of the occupying powers, accusing her not of any crime, but of fighting for a political ideal.” Such repudiation joined with a widespread sense of victimhood that “freed the Germans from the need to examine their own consciences.”
An illuminating examination of a little-known aspect of World War II.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53430-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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