The Ratline: The Exalted Life and
Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive was
published by Knopf on February 2, 2021. It is 417 pages long, inclusive of
endnotes and a bibliography. Black-and-white photos illustrate the text.
Ratline recounts the encounter between author
Philippe Sands, a Jewish-British lawyer and law professor and descendant of
Holocaust victims, and Horst von Wachter, the son of a Nazi war criminal. Baron
Otto Gustav von Wachter (1901 – 1949) was Austrian born. He was an early and
enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, joining the Nazi Sturmabteilung or Storm
Troopers in 1923. He eventually rose to SS-Gruppenfuhrer, or major general rank.
He served under Governor General Hans Frank, the notorious "Butcher of Poland,"
in Krakow and Galicia in Nazi-occupied Polish and Ukrainian territory. Wachter
sent Jews, non-Jewish Poles, and other victims of Nazism to their deaths. After
the war, Wachter hid out in the Austrian Alps. He eventually made his way to
Italy, hoping to travel, via ratlines, that is, escape routes for Nazis, to
safety in South America. Instead, he sickened and died in Italy.
Otto von Wachter married Charlotte
Bleckmann in 1932. They had six children. Charlotte was an active diarist and
letter-writer. Horst, their son, shared his extensive trove of documents with
author Sands.
The Ratline has received rave reviews from both readers and professional reviewers. The book did not work for me, for reasons I'll outline, below, after a discussion of the book's reception and a summary of its contents.
Best-selling spy novelist John le Carré calls
Ratline "hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." The New
York Times assesses Ratline as "Brilliant, deeply moving … gripping
... fascinating … important … vivid ... fiercely inquiring ... suspenseful ...
extraordinary." Amateur reviewers at Amazon are similarly wowed. Ratline
racks up over 500 reviews, averaging 4.5 stars out of a possible five. A
top Amazon review states that Ratline "reads like the most
engrossing novel you’ve ever read." On the other hand, the tiny number of
negative reviews include the following. "This is a tedious read. The pages
upon pages of references to conversations and discussion could have been"
an appendix. "This goes on and on, one feels strung along for many pages …
This back and forth got tiring … too long with thin gruel in the last
1/3." Another reader said, "Sands pads it out with lots of 'you won't
believe what happened next' chapter transitions" and "long
descriptions of his meetings with" Horst. And another "I really
wanted to love this book … What I had hoped would be a page-turner was a chore
to get through."
Sands writes The Ratline, partially,
as a memoir. He is a character in the book, an international lawyer and
descendant of Holocaust victims embarking on a journey of discovery with Horst,
the son of a Nazi, as his guide. Sands' grandfather was Leon Buchholz, a Jew
living in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. His great-grandmother, Amalia Buchholz,
was killed in Treblinka. Sands records his own efforts to discover facts
through visits to archives and interviews with authoritative scholars, some of
whom are his personal friends.
Horst was named after the
Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Nazi anthem. Horst's middle name, Arthur, is from Arthur
Seyss-Inquart, a Nazi war criminal and friend of Horst's parents. Horst keeps a
photo of this mass murderer on his night table, along with photos of his
parents.
After introducing Horst, Ratline makes
one of its many changes in narrative direction. The reader is taken to 1901
Vienna, where Otto von Wachter is born, the son of an Austrian war hero and
"virulent antisemite." Teenage Otto joins an antisemitic group
demanding a boycott of Jewish establishments. In 1921 he participates in
organized, violent attacks on Viennese Jews.
Charlotte Bleckmann is born in 1908. She
enjoys the existence of a pampered princess. Her father is a wealthy
businessman. A locomotive is named after young "Lotte." Her extensive
diaries record trips to movies, museums, plays, and dance performances. She
travels internationally and flirts with handsome suitors, including a
"dashing Jew." One of her Jewish friends would later die in a
concentration camp. She is smitten with Otto from their first meeting, but he is
hard to pin down. He has affairs with many women, before and after their
marriage. Charlotte finally traps him by getting pregnant. Even then, others have
to pressure him to propose.
In 1931, Charlotte gifts Otto with a
copy of Mein Kampf. She joins the Nazi Party that year. She writes in
her diary of her hostility to Jews and her fantasies of confronting a Jewish person
with a dagger in her hand.
After these chapters introducing Otto
and Charlotte, Sands returns to the present day. Horst insists that his parents
were fine people who merely wanted to help the Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews
whose land the Nazis invaded. "The system was criminal," Horst says,
but not his father. Horst does blame, by name, other Nazis who worked with his
father, but not his father. This pattern will repeat throughout the book. Sands
points to evidence of Horst's parents' culpability, for example, a photo of
Otto, in uniform, standing inches away from Adolf Hitler. One of the entries in
Charlotte's diary records the family's "ski jumping with Hitler." Documents
prove that Otto was a key player who contributed to the genocide of Jews, and
the murder and mistreatment of other targeted groups, under his authority. As
Sands introduces new information, again and again, Horst denies it and insists
that his parents were fine people and completely innocent. For this reader,
this pattern rapidly became pointlessly and tediously repetitious, as well as
grotesque and offensive.
Returning to historical narrative, Sands
reports that in 1934, Otto participates in a failed coup in Austria. He becomes
a fugitive from justice and abandons Charlotte and their two young children. Otto
makes his way to Germany where he "serves" in Dachau. She joins him.
He has affairs; Charlotte "punishes" him in various ways, including
aborting his children. On another occasion, she names the child she was
pregnant with during one of his affairs after the other woman, Traut.
Otto writes a letter to his SS superiors
announcing, "I hereby report that I completed my resignation from the
Roman Catholic Church." Nazism is hostile to Christianity in general and
Catholicism in particular. Otto declares himself gottglaubig. SS
commander Heinrich Himmler encourages his troops to leave Christian churches
and identify as "gottglaubig." Such believers announce,
"We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the
Earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer."
The narrative shifts back to the present
day, and Sands' interminable conversations with Horst. Horst insists that his
enthusiastic Nazi father was merely "trying to be nice" to Poles,
Jews, and Ukrainians. Otto was offered a chance to leave his post overseeing
the destruction of Poland and the genocide of Poland's Jews; there was an offer
of "a desk job in Vienna;" he remained at the helm of atrocity. He
stayed because, according to Horst, "He wanted to do something positive in
a former Austrian province." Horst insists that there was no post-war
indictment against his father. In fact the post-war Polish government indicted
Otto von Wachter for mass murder, and would have done to him what they did to
Rudolf Hoess, who was hanged in Auschwitz, the camp he once commanded.
Back in the pre-war timeline narrative, Charlotte
and her children move into a property stolen from Jews. Charlotte records that
a friend "obtained the Jewess Bettina Mendl's house for us." Phyllis
McDuff, daughter of Bettina Mendl, would later report that Otto and Charlotte
"looted the Mendl's family treasures including a fine collection of art
and antique crystal glassware." Otto's colleague Walter Rafelsberger
"by the end of 1938" had "seized more than 26,000 Jewish small
and medium-sized enterprises."
Otto uses his power to fire any
government employee who has a history that might suggest resistance to Nazi
ideology. He sends a couple of his former professors to concentration camps,
where they die. Charlotte records her despair at her husband's extramarital
affairs; she records no word of Kristallnacht.
Otto becomes "governor of
Krakow," where, according to Charlotte's diary, he exercises power in a
"humane and sympathetic" way. His rule is characterized by its
"humanity." "He refused to shoot innocent people." "He
would always say, 'You have to try to understand the people and govern with
love.'" But, as the book points out, Charlotte knows what is really going
on. Otto writes to her on one occasion, "Tomorrow I have to have fifty
Poles publicly shot." Local Jews are forced to prepare a mass grave for
the Poles. One can see photos of the December 18, 1939 mass shooting in Bochnia
here. One can see a photo of Otto von
Wachter, in his spiffy black leather SS coat, at the site of this shooting here.
Otto's father writes to his son pleading
for intervention for his personal friend, Otto Schremmer. Schremmer's daughter
married a Jew. Could not Otto help this child, living in lands Otto controlled?
Otto responds that the law is the law.
Charlotte is especially fond of Hans
Frank, who liked to brag about how many Poles he massacred. "If I put up a
poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be
sufficient to manufacture the paper for such posters." And this, "I
ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear. They will have to go
… we must destroy the Jews wherever we meet them and whenever opportunity
offers … We can’t shoot these 3.5 million [Polish] Jews, and we can’t poison
them, but we can take steps which, one way or another, will lead to
extermination."
Charlotte, in her diary, describes Frank
as "very intelligent. An excellent musician and well-versed in history … I
wore Franks' boots, sloppily," she records. "I am so in love and long
for the moment I will see him again." The affair goes nowhere; Frank is in
love with another woman, also not his wife. Frank and his wife Brigitte Herbst,
who calls herself "The Queen of Poland," are unhappily married; both
have affairs, and Brigitte aborts babies possibly conceived by one of her
lovers.
Otto also appreciates Hans Frank. Otto
writes to him about the Final Solution, "It will bring me great joy and
proud satisfaction in the coming year to work as a loyal follower on your
project." The "project" does discomfit Otto in one way.
Massacring Jews lowers available slave labor. "The Jews are being deported
in increasing numbers, and it's hard to get powder for the tennis court."
Franz Rehrl was a Roman Catholic
politician. He was, Charlotte reports in her diary, "anti-Hitler," so
Nazis take over his house and send Rehrl to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Moving into Rehrl's confiscated property, Charlotte reports, gives her
"peace and quiet."
In 1943, Otto's colleague Fritz, aka
Friedrich Katzmann, publishes Final Report on the Solution of the Jewish
Question in the District of Galicia. Katzmann boasted of
"evacuating" 434,329 Jews. Katzmann includes a detailed breakdown of
thirty-four different types of valuables looted by Nazis. This inventory
includes 20,952 gold wedding rings, the exact number of copper, gold, nickel,
and silver coins, 11,730 gold teeth bridges, 28,200 face powder compacts, 68
cameras, 98 binoculars, 7 stamp collections, and one trunk of watch parts. This
document is just one item of many that Sands advances to weaken Horst's
insistence that his father was innocent.
In 1934, Himmler set exclusive standards
for SS men. They were to be pure Germans, tall, healthy, with no criminal
record. Nazi ideology classed Slavs as racial inferiors, slated for slavery or
extermination. As the war depleted German manpower, non-Germans were recruited
or conscripted into the SS. Otto recruits Ukrainians into the first Waffen-SS
division composed of non-Germans. As Otto puts it to Charlotte, "Why
should only our good, German blood be spilt in the field?"
Charlotte volunteers in a hospital. She
falls in love with Lieutenant Horst Stutzen. She aborts another one of Otto's
babies.
The narrative moves to 2014 Lviv. Horst,
Sands, and Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, travel to Ukraine. When Niklas
was a child, he was often taken to concentration camps. On one occasion, as
Niklas describes in the documentary Hitler's Children, guards sat
starving prisoners on a donkey, then slapped the donkey. The prisoners fell to
the ground. "They could only pick
themselves up again very slowly … they
tried to help each other." Niklas' father, Hans Frank, laughed at this
entertainment. Afterward, "we had cocoa," Niklas said. "I dream
of the piles of corpses in the camps." Unlike Horst, Niklas recognizes
that his father was a war criminal.
Horst, Niklas, and Sands attend an event
to commemorate the Waffen-SS division founded by Otto. Veterans attend in SS
uniforms. The attendees claim they are celebrating resistance to the Red Army,
that is, the military arm of the Soviet Union that had, ten years earlier,
forced a deadly famine on Ukraine. Horst says that the event proves that his
father was "a decent man."
Back to 1944. Charlotte blames Jews for
the Third Reich's deteriorating military situation. Jews "contaminate
everything." Otto abandons Lemberg as the Red Army approaches. Himmler sends
him to Italy. Otto is offered a chance to participate in an assassination
attempt on Hitler. Otto rejects this proposal. He remains confident in
"the rightness of our principles." Nazism is all about "improved
living conditions for the masses." Nazis didn't want war; Jews started the
war. As the Red Army enters Krakow, Charlotte writes that it is
"unimaginable" that a Polish flag would fly over the city that her
German husband had so recently ruled. After Hitler's suicide, Otto tells
Charlotte to "destroy" his archives.
In May, 1945, Otto becomes a fugitive. For
three years, Otto hides out in the Austrian Alps, accompanied by Burkhard
Rathmann, a fellow fugitive Nazi and expert mountaineer. They break into
mountain huts and steal food. They poach sheep. Some "pretty milkmaids"
give them milk. Otto barely escapes death by avalanche. Charlotte and Otto
correspond, and she meets up with him regularly to give him food and supplies
for his mountain life.
Horst and Sands visit Otto's mountain
companion, Burkhard Rathmann, in 2017. They are told that if either asks any
questions about what Rathmann did before 1945, they will be ejected from
Rathmann's home. In response to Horst's questions, Rathmann responds that Otto
"treated the Jews humanely … he was not responsible … he tried to help
them." Rathmann keeps a framed portrait of Hitler on his shelf.
In New York,
in 2015, Horst attends a movie entitled A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did.
Afterward Horst complains that a review of the film gave him "severe
diarrhea."
Austria, 1945. Charlotte's social
horizons are limited. People don't want to associate with such a prominent
Nazi. Her son is denied entry to an exclusive school. Her brothers lose their
homes, "simply because they were party members. So unfair." The
"anti-Hitler" Governor Rehrl returns from Ravensbrück and takes his
house back.
Charlotte gets pregnant and has a third
abortion. Otto moves on to Italy, the ratlines, and his hoped-for escape to
South America. Needing money, he writes to Charlotte asking her to sell
valuables they had looted from Poland, for example, an artwork by Albrecht
Durer. While Charotte was looting Polish art, Sands reports, she "sailed
into the gallery in the Cloth Hall … she made her way around the rooms of the
museum, identifying the items she desired … The museum suffered major,
irretrievable losses at the hands of" Charlotte von Wachter. Even as she
looted, Charlotte announced to the museum director, "Wir sind keine
Rauber." "We are not robbers." Sands writes that her
children and grandchildren hold on to art looted by Charlotte.
Charlotte does as Otto asks, and sells
some loot and sends the proceeds to him. She suspects that Otto, once again, is
cheating on her. She encourages him to "have some fun." Otto
responds, "What chutzpah, as the Jews would say."
Sands shows a post-war, Polish indictment
of Otto to Horst. Horst pooh-poohs this evidence that his father was a war
criminal. Poland's post-war government was Communist and could not be trusted,
Horst insists, in spite of testimonials by Poles who witnessed the suffering
the Nazis exacted on Poland, and who lost relatives to Nazi genocide. Seeking
support for his denial, Horst writes to Dieter Schenk, an historian and expert
on the portion of Poland ruled by Hans Frank and Otto von Wachter. Schenk writes
back, aware that he was writing to Otto's son. "Under Otto's rule in the
district of Galicia, more than 525,000 people lost their lives. Less than three
percent of the pre-war Jewish population survived." Schenk concludes his
note to Horst, "Please erase me from your address book."
In Italy, Otto is helped by a ragtag crew,
including former Nazis, fascist Italians, and, significantly, Catholic Bishop Alois
Hudal. Otto is housed in the Vigna Pia, a monastery. He is chronically short of
cash. He is afraid that anyone he meets might betray him. Even "decent,
harmless" Nazis were being betrayed and caught. The Vigna Pia is, he
writes "half ruin … half prison, unbelievably grimy." His cell is
stuffy and without a breeze and all he gets for breakfast is milky coffee. He
has to give up running because it wears out his shoes. He swims in the Tiber,
in spite of its filth and the danger of possible disease.
In July, 1949, Otto meets with friends,
goes swimming, and takes to bed. He develops a fever and nausea. He is dead
within days. Horst insists his father was poisoned. That someone murdered his
father supports Horst's fantasy that his father was a victim, not a victimizer.
Sands devotes the book's final one hundred fifty pages to investigation of
Otto's death.
I'll cut to the chase and reveal the not
very surprising result of Sands' investigation. The Tiber was filthy. Otto swam
in it. He contracted leptospirosis. The CDC defines leptospirosis as "a
disease caused by bacteria that affects people and animals. It's spread in the
urine of infected animals … The bacteria can survive in contaminated water or
soil for weeks to months… [it] can lead to kidney damage, meningitis, liver
failure, trouble breathing, and even death. About 1 million cases in people
occur around the world each year, with nearly 60,000 deaths."
"Directly touching body fluids from an infected animal" can causes
disease. Leptospirosis was "endemic in Italy" in the post-war era.
Otto writes to Charlotte before he dies.
So he's sick, she acknowledges. What about all the times he left her alone to
deal with heavy burdens, she reminds him, while he was off being Nazi governor
of Krakow. She couldn't "just drop everything" and travel to Rome to
be by his side. "I've got nowhere [in Rome] to stay and I'd rather avoid
the expense." Just remember, she tells Otto, "It was horrible but I
never lost hope. Just remember, Hummi has often been very ill, thought
she was at death's door, and she didn't have a Hummsten to call on, because she couldn't get a hold
of him … My God, how ill have I been in the past and Hummi didn't come
and see me. I had to get by on my own. That was hard. I was so miserable back
in Lemberg as well, and Hummi didn't believe me."
Charlotte eventually travels to Rome.
She discovers that Otto has already died.
Ratline's final chapters hop from topic to topic.
Sands reports that Otto's family shun him for participating in exploration of
Otto's and Charlotte's Nazism. At least one living relative is an antisemite.
Some hold on to looted artworks and refuse to return them to Poland. As for
Bishop Hudal, his shepherding of Nazis through the ratlines was exposed by a
communist newspaper in 1949. This caused a scandal. "Hudal resigned
because of the Wachter matter," Sands reports.
Sands discovers that American
intelligence officer Thomas A. Lucid had a child by an Italian woman. Lucid
abandoned both mother and child. Sands tracks down Lucid's illegitimate son and
visits him in Switzerland, and finds his brothers, born of his marriage to an
American woman, and informs all of them of their relationship.
In his explorations, Sands discovers,
and reports on, how British and American intelligence were fully aware of the
ratlines. Americans used the ratlines to aid the escape of war criminals like
Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon. Barbie went to Bolivia, where he continued
his career as a professional torturer. The Americans knew about Otto's presence
in Rome. No one bothered to capture him, in spite of the Polish indictment. "Poland
was in the Soviet sphere" – thanks, of course, to deals like that struck
at Yalta – and the Cold War now dictated behavior. "The Americans would be
less inclined to cooperate with a request from Warsaw for his [Otto's]
extradition." "The hunt for ex-Nazis was diminishing." The
Soviets, too, were less inclined to try and convict captured Nazis. Rather,
they used them for their own intelligence purposes.
Sands meets up with his friend and
neighbor John le Carre. Le Carre mentions how disorienting it was for him to
discover that with the advent of the Cold War, the West's approach to ex-Nazis
changed. "I'd been brought up to hate Nazism, and all of a sudden, to find
that we'd turned on a sixpence, and the great new enemy was to be the Soviet
Union. It was very perplexing." "Americans may have helped to
create" the ratlines. Le Carre acknowledges that "some elements"
in the Vatican supported the ratlines, while "other elements pulled in a
different direction." Le Carre says that some "serious elements"
among Americans and Brits wanted to unite with Nazis and attack the Soviet
Union. "It sounds crazy, but it was very much in the battle smoke of the
time."
Sands meets with experts on the
decomposition of poisoned corpses, and discusses whether or not it is possible
to detect poison in corpses, depending on the type of poison, and the age and
condition of the corpse. This material struck this reader as unnecessary, given
that leptospirosis was such a clear cause of death, but Horst is so insistent
on his father's being a "victim" that Sands must travel this route.
Towards the end of the book, Sands
confronts Horst with a letter that he, Horst, wrote in the past, in 2007. Horst
wrote to his nephew that Otto, "knew everything, observed it, and
consented." In other words, in spite of his repeated insistence to Sands
that his father Otto was a "decent" man who tried to help Jews,
Poles, and Ukrainians under his administration, Horst had previously
acknowledged that Otto was in fact a participant in war crimes.
Horst replies, "Today I wouldn't
say this." Rather, he must defend his father. "I have to do it for my
parents, to find good things." Sands hears an echo in something Charlotte
said to a journalist. Charlotte explained that Otto said to her, "Why
should I look at that which I do not see as positive?" Charlotte added,
"One does not look at things if one knows that people are being tortured
and murdered."
Some of the problems I had with this
book were superficial. I would have preferred a book with a more streamlined
narrative and less attention to tangents. Sands' tracking down Thomas Lucid's
sons did not add to the book's main narrative. The pages devoted to the search
for poison in the bodies of variously decomposing corpses were a red herring,
given that it was clear that Wachter died of an infection that was common in
post-war Italy. I would have preferred an appendix dedicated to Sands' various
research trips and correspondences, rather than their inclusion in the text,
because their inclusion interrupted narrative flow.
My other problems with the book were
more substantial. I was driven to read Ratline because its marketing
promised me better understanding of the ratlines, and also a complex depiction
of a Nazi capable of deep love. The book disappointed me on both counts.
American intelligence and the
International Committee of the Red Cross participated in the ratlines, for
their own reasons. The Church's participation confounded my attempt to
understand. When discussing this book with an atheist, my friend said, "Of
course the Catholic Church helped Nazis escape through the ratlines. The
Catholic Church is antisemitic."
My friend's stance is rather typical. Catholicism
is antisemitic, so "the Vatican" helped Nazis escape. With this
approach, there is no further questioning and no further explanation offered.
My friend's stance is comparable to Sands' stance in his book. He implies that
"the Vatican" was all in on the ratlines, and it was because of
antisemitism. I'm putting "the Vatican" in quotes because Sands uses
this phrase several times. "The Vatican" did this and "the
Vatican" did that. Again, this is unsatisfying. Who, exactly in the
Vatican did what, when, and why?
This simplistic answer will inevitably
not satisfy anyone who thinks beyond the cliché, "The Catholic Church is
antisemitic." My problems with this simplistic answer are not rooted in
denial.
Rather, saying that a person or an
entity is antisemitic and that that person or entity would go on to forge
documents and arrange safe houses so that Franz Stangl, responsible for the
murder of perhaps a million Jews, could escape justice is an entirely different
thing. America was significantly antisemitic in the twentieth century. This
antisemitism affected American immigration policy as well as everyday life. American
antisemitism erected barriers to Jews seeking home ownership, university
admission, and employment. And yet America, in spite of its antisemitism, threw
itself into the fight against Nazism. When American soldiers liberated Dachau,
these soldiers killed Nazis, sometimes shooting in the stomach so as to prolong
the Nazi's dying agony. Other soldiers provided prisoners with knives and
shovels and looked the other way as prisoners beat Nazis to death. At least one
prisoner stomped a Nazi to death as an American watched. The fury of American
soldiers confronted with Nazi depravity is normal. Aiding the escape of Nazi
war criminals is not normal. I needed more information than this book provided
to understand it.
I ask Sands to see what I see when I
think about "the Vatican" helping Nazis escape – and that explanation
sufficing, with no further insight offered. Philippe Sands, please see this photograph of Nazis mass shooting
Polish Catholic priests in Bydgoszcz, Poland, in September, 1939. Or this photograph of a Polish Catholic priest
patiently waiting to be shot to death by a Nazi. Or this photograph of Father Piotr Sosnowski
awaiting execution by a Nazi. Nazis tortured the 83-year-old Bishop Nowowiejski
in a concentration camp for three months before he died; Bishop Wetmanski died
on an unknown date in a concentration camp; Bishop Goral died in Sachsenhausen.
In Auschwitz, Father Maximilian Kolbe was starved and then injected with
carbolic acid. Dachau included a "Priests' Barracks," the
"largest monastery in Germany." Nazis tortured and murdered Bishop
Zawistowski in Dachau.
SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Karl Greiser
ruled over Wartheland, the German name for one division of Nazi-occupied Polish
territory. Nazi lawyer and judge August Friedrich Christian Jager served under
Greiser. Both worked to eliminate Catholicism. Jager was known as
"Kirchen-Jager" or Church hunter. As historian Richard J. Evans writes, "Numerous clergy, monks,
diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to
the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or
simply shot. Altogether some 1,700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of
them did not survive their imprisonment … By the end of 1941, the Polish
Catholic Church had been effectively outlawed in the Wartheland." Polish
Cardinal Hlond wrote to the pope, "Hitlerism aims at the systematic and
total destruction of the Catholic Church." By one estimate, the Nazis
killed 11 million Slavs, many of them Christian.
After the war, Polish Catholics did not
allow Greiser or Jager the escape of a ratline. Greiser was hanged while a
"huge crowd" of spectators watched approvingly. He was cremated in
"the same ovens used to cremate thousands of Polish and Jewish victims
during the Nazi occupation." His ashes were probably "scattered in an
unknown area," according to historian Catherine Epstein. Jager was also hanged.
The post-war execution of Nazis was a
form of entertainment in Poland. Historian Tomasz Frydel writes, "In May 1946, the trial by the
Special Penal Court of Gdańsk of eleven functionaries (including five women) of
the Stutthof (Sztutowo) concentration camp, turned into a huge public
spectacle, with as many as 50,000 watching the public hanging." In spite
of this "spectacle" aspect, "The Polish contribution to the
prosecution of Nazi perpetrators is regarded as exceptional and successful in
delivering some measure of justice." No one would argue that Catholic
Poland was a country free of antisemitism, and yet it managed to send Nazis to
Hell.
I'm aware of this history. Many of
Sands' readers will not be, and will shrug and say, "Of course 'the
Vatican' helped Nazis escape. 'The Vatican' did that because 'the Vatican' is
antisemitic." Me? Given the above facts, and plenty of other facts, I need
to know more. I hoped to gain greater insight in reading this 417-page book,
and I never found that insight in these pages. Sands was sure to inform me that
Thomas Lucid, a minor character whose story of an abandoned son by an Italian
mother is peripheral to the main narrative, liked to drink old fashioneds, a
cocktail, as Sands reports, made of "bourbon or Canadian whiskey, a touch
of water, Angostura bitters, a couple of pieces of fruit." But Sands
merely hand waves away antisemitism in "the Vatican" as sufficient
explanatory power for Bishop Hudal's participation in the ratlines.
I had to put Ratline down while
reading it and try to gain more knowledge about the ratlines from other
sources. I read historian Martin Menke's review of a book about Bishop Hudal. Hudal,
in this review, comes across as a deeply flawed German nationalist with a sick and
irrational relationship to Nazism. In 1937, Hudal published a book praising
Nazism. Nazis suppressed the book – they didn't want any association with a
Catholic bishop. This suppression of his work did not wake Hudal up out of his
fantasies that Catholicism and Nazism could be reconciled. Menke writes that
"Hudal completely misunderstood the National Socialists’ intentions and
overestimated his own importance. The changes in National Socialist ideology
that Hudal considered necessary and possible were, in fact, unimaginable."
This brief review helped me to understand Hudal better than Sands' book.
I also found a lecture and video by Gerald J.
Steinacher, James A. Rawley Professor of History at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. Steinacher points out that "Hudal was not fully in line
anymore at this point in time with the Pope and the Vatican." I wrote to
Prof. Steinacher and he was unable to provide me with a sound-bite-sized
explanation for Catholic contributions to the ratlines. He informed me that the
situation was complex and that I need to read his lengthy book. He also said
that "The background of the early Cold War and the postwar refugee crisis
is crucial for understanding this particular topic."
Ratline also promised insight into a mystery:
how could a Nazi mass murderer be a loving family man? Sands leaves out
information that might easily solve that alleged mystery. Otto governed in
Galicia. Otto was born in the Austrian Empire. Under Austrian rule, Galicia was
"the poorest province in Europe," according to historian Norman
Davies. Famines were common. "Approximately 50,000 people died every year
of malnutrition," writes historian Ivan L. Rudnytsky.
Alcoholism was rampant, as was debt. Jews were disproportionately represented
among both tavern-keepers and moneylenders and this contributed to
antisemitism. These conditions were not "natural." They were the result
of decisions made by those in power. Slavic peasants existed to work agriculture,
to provide food for the empire. They had little access to health care,
education, market economics, or self-determination. Austria did not abolish
serfdom until 1848.
Contempt for Slavic peasants and for
Jews pre-existed the rise of Nazism, as did a conviction of German superiority.
Kulturkampf, the Drang nach Osten, and the Eastern Marches
Society were nineteenth-century phenomena. They existed before Nazism. They
were all expressions of hostility to Slavs and a conviction of German
superiority and a German right to territory inhabited by Slavs. The
pre-existing Germanic contempt for Slavic peasants and Jews was fortified by the
rise of scientific racism and social Darwinism. With these ideas, Jews and
Slavs were not just foreign and inferior, they were of different, dangerous,
perpetually inferior races.
After World War I, Austria shrank.
Suddenly there were countries called "Poland" and
"Czechoslovakia," where Germanic people previously ruled. Charlotte
wrote that is was "unimaginable" that a Polish flag should fly over
Polish people exercising self-determination in Polish territory. Charlotte
Bleckmann von Wachter was born in the Austrian Empire, where she could
unquestioningly accept her own superiority over the Slavic peasants who
provided her with food. The loss of territory shattered her world.
Otto and Charlotte were both born to
privilege. Charlotte was the daughter of a steel magnate. Otto's father was a
war hero, defense minister, and a baron. Both Otto and Charlotte joined the
Nazi Party when they were young. Given their ethnicity, the history of their
country, and their personal history, there is really no great mystery as to why
they became Nazis.
Both Otto and Charlotte engaged in a
common human flaw, summed up in the old saw, "See no evil, hear no evil,
speak no evil." Charlotte focused on the concerts she went to; in their
letters, she and Otto focused on holidays and domestic matters. Nor were Otto
and Charlotte a Nazi Romeo and Juliet. He cheated on her from day one to his
death; he had to be forced to marry her. He was no model family man, spending
little time with his children. Both had affairs. Charlotte's words to her
husband as he was dying are petty, self-absorbed, and malicious. There is no
great love story or poignant family drama in these pages.
Much of Ratline focuses on
Horst's denial. What I needed to know about Horst I could have read in three
pages, not 417. He's an old Austrian who lives in a castle. He insists that his
father, a Nazi who committed mass murder, was a decent man. No amount of
photographic or written documentary evidence, including his own letter,
convinces him otherwise. That's really all I need to know about Horst von
Wachter.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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