NOEL KING, HOST:
Philippe Sands is a human rights lawyer who has worked on cases involving crimes against humanity. Sands grandfather was a Jew who lived in what is today the city of Lviv, Ukraine. The Nazis killed him, his family and tens of thousands of other people there. The Nazi officer who governed the city at that time was called Otto Wachter. While researching his own family, Sands met Wachter s son, Horst, and found him to be a decent man. They became friendly and Horst Wachter gave Sands a cache of data - the Wachter family archive.
PHILIPPE SANDS: A USB popped through my letterbox in a tatty envelope. I remember putting it in my diary and being astonished by what I saw - 10,000 pages, family photo albums; Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels; Mom, Dad, skiing, lakes. It was extraordinary because it is from the family archives that you really learn what happened.
Following the Trail of a Nazi Mass Murderer Who Was Never Caught
Otto Wächter and his family, 1948.Credit.Horst Wächter
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By Philippe Sands
In his brilliant, deeply moving 2016 book “East West Street,” Philippe Sands wove the story of his own Eastern European Jewish family with those of two jurists who forged the legal framework for the Nuremberg trials: Hersch Lauterpacht, who put forth the concept of “crimes against humanity,” and Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide.” Both men and Sands’s maternal grandfather hailed from Lemberg now Lviv, in Ukraine and all had relatives slaughtered in the Holocaust. His latest book, “The Ratline,” is a gripping sequel.
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By Philippe Sands
Knopf: 448 pages, $30
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Can a book about a powerful Nazi and the struggle to pierce his son’s abiding belief in his father’s blamelessness
be relevant seven decades after the end of World War II? After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the answer is obvious: Yes, in 2021, America has a Nazi problem. In the coming months we’ll be facing questions about what accountability looks like and how to talk to those who love and support the militants in their families.