Swiss sociologist Ziegler (Geneva Univ.) excoriates the gnomes of Zurich, the bankers of Basle and all the rest of his countrymen who, he reveals, gave steady and material aid to the Third Reich. Now we have an important addition to the burgeoning body of material detailing the hypocritical “neutrality” of Swiss financier-politicians during and since WW II. Ziegler offers official documents, graphic Holocaust materials, personal recollections, and vivid character sketches that demonstrate the conflict in Europe was prolonged and hundreds of thousands of lives were lost because of Swiss cupidity. When hostilities started, Ziegler demonstrates, the Germans could not have sustained the costs of a long war with Reichmarks alone. Gold taken from central banks of conquered nations and from the teeth and fingers of Nazi victims was transported to Swiss banks in exchange for currency used to buy material essential to the German war effort. Ziegler shows that the Swiss knowingly laundered the stolen goods. They were delighted to take in Hitler’s loot, but not his victims. Desperate Jews were stopped at the border and returned to their captors for prompt incineration. After the war, at a Washington conference to sort out the mathematics, Hitler’s fences were models of affronted innocence. They still are. After half a century, while proofs of their old intransigence mount, they remain intransigent, yielding only what they must. As Ziegler says, “gnomes always confine themselves to admitting what cannot be denied—in other words, what the ‘damned’ foreigners can prove beyond doubt.” Of course, there were and are many whose principles extended beyond the veil of holy bank secrecy. But on the whole it’s a tale of bad faith and prejudice on a national scale, one not easy to discount given the significant evidence presented here. A solid and sober contribution to a growing subspecialty of wartime and Holocaust history, rightfully sardonic.
Pub Date: March 31, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100334-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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