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
11 New Books We Recommend This Week
Feb. 11, 2021
Crime and punishment make their presence felt in this week’s recommended titles, from Russell Shorto’s family history of his grandfather’s mob ties (“Smalltime”) to Philippe Sands’s account of a Nazi fugitive (“The Ratline”); Maurice Chammah’s study of the death penalty and its decline (“Let the Lord Sort Them”) to Reuben Jonathan Miller’s look at the life that awaits ex-inmates (“Halfway Home”).
Also on our night stands this week: Ethan Zuckerman’s new book about the collapse of institutional authority (“Mistrust”), Emily Rapp Black’s memoir of motherhood and grief (“Sanctuary”), Jeremy Atherton Lin’s personal and cultural history (“Gay Bar”) and Avi Loeb’s argument that aliens visited the neighborhood in 2017 (“Extraterrestrial”). Finally, there’s Thomas Healy’s “Soul City,” about one man’s attempt to create a Black-run city in the 1970s; Charles Wheelan’s “We Came