The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive

The past,” William Faulkner sternly warned, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” His admonition is at the unarticulated narrative heart of this solemn, graceful, and powerful account by lawyer and historian Sands (East West Street). The sins, lies, and rationalizations of mothers and fathers who supported the Nazi regime, Sands makes uncomfortably clear, are massive burdens that weigh down the lives of the generations that follow. And for the descendants of those who suffered monstrously as the Final Solution goose-stepped its way across Europe, the martyrdom of their ancestors is a heavy knowledge, too; it is an armory of suppressed rage. For the children of both the murderers and the murdered, there is no escape. The tale is set in motion by a single ambition: to discover what happened to Otto Wächter, the SS governor of the occupied city in Galicia where Sands’s grandfather lived. On a tenacious journey, part hands-on investigation, part rumination, across Europe and on to America, Sands interviews a wide-ranging collection of fascinating characters to find answers (there is even a brief walk-on role for his neighbor, John le Carré). Yet it would be a mistake to think of this rich, compulsively readable book as simply a treatise on the virulent scars etched deep by the Third Reich and its all-too-eager cohorts. Its rewards are many, and many-faceted. It is also a far-reaching whodunit into a mysterious death, where even the dead ends are engaging; a wartime love story between a high-ranking SS official and his ambitious wife (and a subtly corrosive portrait of their bewildering and criminal delusions as they enjoy their gilded life); a story of a son who desperately struggles in spite of condemning evidence “to find the good things” in his deeply flawed parents; an infuriating spotlight on cynically pragmatic ties between American spymasters, the Vatican, and Nazi war criminals; and, in a revelation that blindsides the reader, a resourceful probing into buried familial ties that reveal, as Sands writes in his carefully controlled prose, “the curiosity of life, the strange and unexpected points of connection.” Throughout, Sands is a reliable narrator—gracious, wise, and intrepid. And at its very end, the long odyssey culminates in the book’s final sentence, an unequivocal declaration by Wächter’s granddaughter, a headscarf-wearing Muslim convert: “My grandfather was a mass murderer.” Her searing acknowledgment will resonate long after the reader turns the last page of this remarkable chronicle. (Feb.) Howard Blum is the author of Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America and, most recently, Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.