A knowledgeable, stringent return to the record and scrutiny of “good neutrality.”
A history of the failure of the “neutral” guardians of humanity in a time of crisis and war.
Steinacher (History and Judaic Studies/Univ. of Nebraska; Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice, 2011, etc.) manages to be evenhanded in this study of the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross and its mission and leaders during World War II. Upon its founding in 1863 by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who was horrified by the slaughter and treatment of the wounded on the battlefields of Italy, the ICRC joined the larger humanitarian movement galvanized by Florence Nightingale, Franz Lieber, and, later, Clara Barton, among others, to ameliorate conditions for the wounded and POWs. These efforts led to the first Geneva Convention (1864) and establishment of other red cross organizations, such as the American Red Cross. While they “drew heavily on the Judeo-Christian idea of caritas, the importance of performing works of mercy and charity,” the movement spread beyond the Western world, emerging in Israel as the Red Star of David and in the Ottoman Empire as the Red Crescent. Steinacher focuses mostly on the ICRC’s pro-German stance during World War II and its “silence on the Holocaust.” The author reveals damaging research regarding the political ambitions and behind-the-scene machinations of ICRC vice president Carl J. Burckhardt, whose virulent anti-communism alienated the Soviet Union and whose anti-Semitic pronouncements outraged Jews. Steinacher cites the figure of 320,000 refugees admitted to Switzerland, “mostly made up of non-Jewish refugees.” The German Red Cross was deeply Nazified, and thus the ICRC leadership “learned early on of Nazi plans to murder European Jews” yet did nothing. Moreover, the ICRC’s emphasis on German POWs and its lax policy of issuing travel documents to escaping Nazis and collaborators earned the opprobrium of the world, paving the way for a showdown with the Swedish Red Cross at the 17th International Red Cross Conference in Stockholm in August 1948.
A knowledgeable, stringent return to the record and scrutiny of “good neutrality.”Pub Date: May 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-870493-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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