By Philippe Sands
Alfred A. Knopf, 417 pages, $30
“It is more important to understand the butcher than the victim,” the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas told Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London. That seems a questionable assertion, not least because the butcher so often eludes understanding. Sands nevertheless was sufficiently struck by the remark to use it as an epigraph to his latest book, “The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive.”
The fugitive in question, Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter, is not one of the star names of Nazi criminality, not a Mengele or an Eichmann or even a Hans Frank, who headed the part of German-occupied Poland known as the General Government. An Austrian SS officer, Wächter became one of Frank’s deputies, presiding over the Jewish ghettos of Kraków and Lemberg (now Lviv, in Ukraine). A man admired for his organizational abilities, he followed orders, and gave them, and hundreds