Of great interest to true-crime and WWII buffs.
A suspenseful, well-rendered tale from the forgotten moments of WWII file, recounting a brilliant—but fortunately foiled—Nazi plan to bring mayhem to America’s shores.
That plan seemed, if not quite a no-brainer, less risky than many of the possibilities that the Abwehr, or German military intelligence, served up once America entered the war. Writes Washington Post reporter Dobbs (Madeleine Albright, 1999, etc.), it entailed inserting German-American agents like Walter Kappe, the former propaganda head of the German-American Bund, “who came back to the Fatherland prior to the outbreak of World War II full of enthusiasm for the New Germany,” into backwaters where they could commit acts of sabotage on industrial and transportation targets while blending in to the populace. Nine agents made it through Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s training regime; their boss, who as early as 1942 was having his doubts about Hitler, regarded them as expendable, remarking to a lieutenant who expressed doubts that the sabotage operation could ever work, “Well, we will lose good Nazis then.” The agents made their way to America by U-boat, some landing smack in the middle of a Coast Guard patrol; they escaped, as did their sub, which had briefly run aground, thanks mostly to the ineptitude of their surprised pursuers. What kept the Nazi spies from fulfilling their mission was the presence among them of two disaffected Germans who, each for his own reason, worked with the FBI to track down the bad guys in what the press later described as “the greatest manhunt in American history.” Dobbs’s tale has a timely aspect, for the German agents—like the suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives now in federal custody—were tried by a military commission and executed. Notes Dobbs, “One of the lessons of the saboteur affair is that it is very difficult to fight a war and respect legal niceties at the same time.”
Of great interest to true-crime and WWII buffs.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41470-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
Veteran readers will be visiting familiar ground, but it’s an irresistible story.
In this surprisingly good knockoff of Stephen Ambrose’s classic Band of Brothers (1992), two members of the legendary E Company give their version of events.
Interviewing Guarnere and Heffron for a magazine article coinciding with the 2001 HBO miniseries, the author realized she had the material for her first book. It reads like oral history, with each man chatting alternately for a few pages, but Post provides the firm editorial hand this approach requires. High-school dropouts from impoverished families in Depression-era Philadelphia, both men quit draft-exempt jobs to enlist in the Army’s elite 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Guarnere, who signed up in 1942, delivers a lively account of the brutal, almost sadistic training. A quick learner with a talent for leadership, he was promoted to sergeant before the unit sailed to England in May 1944 to parachute into France the night before the Normandy invasion. Heffron joined his unit as it recuperated in England after the June 6 landing. The men quickly became friends, parachuting into Holland in September for an exhausting three months of fighting in the abortive Operation Market Garden. Their subsequent rest was cut short by December’s Battle of the Bulge, and they participated in the legendary relief of Bastogne, where Guarnere was injured and lost a leg. Heffron continued fighting across Germany until the surrender. Each of them delivers a relentlessly gripping account highlighting heroism, sacrifice and terrible suffering without concealing a good deal of bad behavior. (Looting was universal, and paratroopers often killed prisoners.) Both men returned to Philadelphia after the war and revived their friendship, which still endures. A coda recounts the burst of fame they experienced following the 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan (based on a one-paragraph reference in Ambrose’s book) and then the HBO series.
Veteran readers will be visiting familiar ground, but it’s an irresistible story.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-425-21728-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
A chilling documentation of what happened in Germany when the Nazis seized power and put their ideas on eugenics and euthanasia into action. Burleigh (International History/London School of Economics; coauthor, The Racial State, not reviewed) points out that the Nazi program began with a humanitarian rationalization: Mentally and physically disabled children were subject to ``mercy killing'' as a form of deliverance. Soon, however, ``mercy killing'' evolved into the elimination of ``life unworthy of life'' as the Nazi killing machine expanded to include more and more victims, and as political, legal, moral, and religious opposition was quashed by the fear of reprisals and totalitarian power. Burleigh demonstrates how Nazi eugenics perverted German medicine and science: Scientists approved the sterilization of some 400,000 people between 1934 and 1945 to eradicate ``degenerative heredity'' in order to ``improve the race.'' Doctors, particularly psychiatrists, were encouraged to falsify medical records, give lethal injections, starve patients, and use other creative means of murder while ignoring the age-old dictum of the physician, ``Do no harm.'' Burleigh also details how asylum populations were decimated as managers, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and other professionals, corrupted by monetary awards and promotions, played their parts in the Nazi murder industry. Daily killings became routine as Nazi propagandists extolled social Darwinism. Burleigh describes how victims were targeted, including Jews, foreigners, enemies of the Reich, gypsies, and those who lacked ``labor values.'' Occasional accounts of humanity brighten the grim story, as medical Schindlers saved patients from death by listing them as valuable workers who were badly needed. After the war, some of the Nazi eugenicists, tried at Nuremberg and in German courts, were executed, while others received light sentences. Most melted into the general population under new identities. A notable contribution to the history of Nazi Germany—and a sobering reminder of what can happen when the claims of science, bureaucracy, and expertise go unchallenged.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-521-41613-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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