THE RATLINE: LOVE, LIES AND JUSTICE ON THE TRAIL OF A NAZI WAR FUGITIVE by Philippe Sands

This is non-fiction, and documents the investigation the author makes into the life and times of a Nazi, Otto Wachter, who was wanted for war crimes but managed to evade the allies after the war, dying in suspicious circumstances in a hospital in Rome in 1949. Wachter set up the  Krakow ghetto and in charge of what happened there, and then was the Governor of Galicia, an area in Ukraine also heavily populated with Jews. The author had Jewish relatives in this area who died while Wachter was in charge. Sands’ research is meticulous and vast, not only books, news articles of the day, but also pages and pages of letters between Otto and his wife Charlotte, and diaries that Charlotte had kept over the course of her life. He also spends hours and hours with Otto and Charlotte’s son Horst, and the son of a close family friend, also a  war criminal who was executed after the Nuremburg trials. The attitudes of the two men to what their respective fathers did during the war is revealing and disturbing. The legacy the families of former Nazis have to carry around is enormous, and continues to affect later generations. The Ratline refers to the process that Nazis took to escape post war Germany and Europe, beginning at the Vatican – this book shows how totally implicit the Catholic church was in its support of the Nazis and the philosoply of the Third Reich – after all it was the Jews that crucified Jesus – ending usually in Argentina which also fully supported the Nazi regime. This would appear to be what Otto was trying to do that led him to Rome. In his research Sands uncovers much more than a man on the run, and in true spy thriller fashion, there are a number of unexpected surprises – all true!  It is an easy book to read, totally engrossing, but it is very heavy on the finer detail of the research, some editing would certainly have helped.