Though of specialized interest, an eye-opening look into a corner of postwar history that seems more medieval than modern.
Of witch trials, quack medicine, and millenarian terrors in the ashes of the Third Reich.
Given the fiery end of Hitler’s regime and the firebombing of Dresden and other cities, it’s understandable that ordinary Germans might have been apocalypse-minded in 1945. That was still true in 1949, writes history professor Black in this sometimes circuitous but well-paced account, four years after the Allied occupation and the division of the country into East and West Germany. In the wave of denazification that immediately followed surrender, old grudges surfaced in accusations of witchcraft and conspiracy theories. At the time, writes the author, German newspapers and kaffeeklatsches alike were also rife with rumors of the end of the world—not so far-fetched given the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War—and with revisitations of the old Norse stories of Ragnarok. Against this backdrop came one of Black’s principal subjects, a Danziger who changed his name from a Polish antecedent to the German Gröning—and who signed up for the Nazi Party years before the annexation, suggesting that he was looking forward to a comfortable life under Hitler. Instead, he grifted his way across the postwar landscape, engaging in a form of faith healing that yielded a string of faux miracles—but also a negligent homicide or two. (One of Gröning's tools, not surprisingly, was tin foil.) The German courts eventually restrained “Gröning the Wunderdoktor” from practicing medicine without a license along about the time he died and he and his victims were forgotten. Other memorable figures Black examines include a crusader who “had a way of popping up almost anywhere that witchcraft accusations surfaced” in a country where pharmacies still sold magical potions with names such as “devil’s dung” until legally ordered to use “ordinary German names.”
Though of specialized interest, an eye-opening look into a corner of postwar history that seems more medieval than modern.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-22567-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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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