Although this was a tempest in a teapot, readers will enjoy Selby’s account of a hitherto-obscure Nazi plot and the...
An entertaining account of a last-gasp Nazi effort.
The director of Hitler Youth escaped Hitler’s bunker after his suicide and attempted to organize a postwar Nazi underground movement. He did not succeed. Selby’s (co-author: Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History, 2010) narrative is partly a dual biography of Artur Axmann (1913-96), an important Nazi official, and Jack Hunter (1921–2009), the American counterintelligence officer who tracked him. Mostly, the book is a procedural. The author follows Hunter, other American operatives and their German undercover workers as they investigate, infiltrate and, finally, after less than a year, round up Axmann and several dozen members of a trucking firm that employed a remarkable number of ex-Youth personnel but did not otherwise seem threatening. While the book’s title is wildly hyperbolic, contemporaries without the benefit of hindsight had to deal with Joseph Goebbels’ fiery 1945 warnings that loyal Nazis would retreat to a well-stocked fortress and fight on until the Allies tired of occupying the Reich. This “operation werewolf” was never more than rhetoric, and Axmann quickly dropped plans for violent resistance. His group planned to build a commercial organization whose income and influence would support a revived Nazi party after the occupation. Most of those arrested were tried, imprisoned for a few years, and then released to live out their lives in a prospering West Germany.
Although this was a tempest in a teapot, readers will enjoy Selby’s account of a hitherto-obscure Nazi plot and the energetic counterintelligence that foiled it.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-25270-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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