” Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable.”– John le Carré From the author of the globally well-known, acclaimed East West Street: A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, cold war espionage, a mystical death in the Vatican– and “the Ratline,” the Nazi escape path to Peron’s Argentina. Baron Otto von Wächter, Austrian legal representative, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former guv of Galicia during the war, developer and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war wrongdoer for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948 … Philippe Sands pieces together, in fascinating information, Wächter’s extraordinary, shocking story. Offered complete access to the Wächter family archives– journals, journals, tapes, and more– and with the help of the Wächters’ child Horst, who thinks his father to have actually been a “good man,” Sands composes of Wächter’s rise through the Nazi high command, his “blissful” marriage and domesticity as their world was brought to ruin, and his four-year flight to escape justice– to the Tirol, to Rome, and the Vatican; given a brand-new identity, on his way to a new life through “the Ratline” to Perón’s Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and countless other Nazis. Wächter’s escape was interrupted by his strange, stunning death in Rome, in the middle of the blossoming Cold War (was he being hired in postwar Italy by the Americans and the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps or by the Soviet NKVD or by both; or was he poisoned by one side or the other, as his child thinks– or by both?) … An extraordinary discovery, told up-close through access to a chest of family correspondence between Wächter and his better half– part historical investigator story, part enjoy story, part family narrative, part Cold War espionage thriller. “Breathtaking, gripping, shattering.”– Elif Shafak
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