The evil that men do
In 2016, a magnificent book by author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands offered both a different kind of memoir and a new angle on Nazi atrocities. East West Street traced the connection between Sands’s grandfather who was born in Lemberg, now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, and the origins of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”, two legal concepts introduced at the Nuremberg trials to prosecute Hitler’s henchmen.
During the course of his research for the book, Sands’s attention turned to Otto Wächter (pictured above, third from the right), who served as Nazi governor in Lemberg from 1942 to 1944. Under his misrule and on his territory, the District of Galicia, more than half a million people perished. No more than 15,000 Jews survived, less than three per cent of the pre-war population. At the end of the war, Wächter escaped justice at Nuremberg by disappearing. He resurfaced in Rome where he died of an acute liver condition in 1949.
Keen to find out more about Wächter’s life and death, and to get to the bottom of his mysterious vanishing act, Sands travelled to the Austrian village of Hagenburg in 2012 to visit his septuagenarian son, Horst. At his empty, crumbling baroque castle, Horst showed Sands a selection of photographs and piqued his interest by making reference to a voluminous family archive. Horst also revealed that he was in denial about his father’s role and responsibilities: in his view, his father was a decent man who tried to do good while others around him committed foul deeds. The pair kept in contact over the years, and when they met again in Hagenburg in 2016, Horst dug out Otto’s final letters. As he read one he broke down, then proceeded to tell Sands that his father didn’t die from an illness after all. More than this, he believed that Otto was killed.
Such a bombshell and such intrigue provide both the premise and the narrative momentum for Sands’s latest book. The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive is a hugely compelling and richly insightful follow-up to East West Street. Like its predecessor, it reads like a gripping fact-finding mission. Sands follows in Otto Wächter’s footsteps, and sifts and assesses his discoveries to create a portrait of a monster and a brilliant account of his journey from golden boy to wanted man.
Sands begins with Wächter’s birth in Vienna in 1901. He trains to be a lawyer, joins the Nazi Party, and meets and marries Charlotte Bleckmann. Following the Machtergreifung in 1933 he rises quickly through the SS ranks, and both husband and wife enjoy the attendant power and perks. In one of Wächter’s first senior positions as state secretary, he is tasked with removing numerous Jewish or politically undesirable public officials from their posts. Later, in occupied Poland, he serves as governor of Kraków and earns a reputation as a man of brutality, not least for his ruthless reprisals against militant Poles and his creation of a ghetto for the city’s Jews. In 1942, shortly after the Wannsee Conference, Hitler personally appoints Otto governor of the District of Galicia. “We need to send our best man to Lemberg, and I’ve been advised he is Otto Wächter.”
That best man for the job oversees actions to round up, deport and liquidate Jews, with the aim of rendering the region Judenfrei. He also contributes to the war effort by setting up a Waffen-SS unit comprised of Ukrainians from his territory — the first such division composed of non-Germans. “Why should only our good, German blood be spilt in the field?” he asked Charlotte. However, that extra military might proves no match for the advancing Red Army. When German armies start to retreat all over Europe, both Otto Wächter and Charlotte realise the game is up. Instead of victory, their priority is survival. She moves to Salzburg with her children. He goes on the run.
Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British and the Poles, as well as Jewish groups, Wächter assumes the first of several new identities — that of an inmate who died at Dachau — and hides out in the Austrian Alps for three years. When at last he emerges he makes his way south towards the Vatican and the Reich migratory route — better known as the “Ratline” — an escape channel used by Nazis to flee Europe for South America. He arrives in Rome under another guise and cloisters himself in a monastery. There he bides his time waiting for travel documents for Argentina. But Rome turns out to be his journey’s end. He dies unexpectedly, just a few days after having lunch with an “old comrade”.
Who was this former comrade? What did Wächter do in hiding? And what exactly caused his death? To divulge would be to spoil. Sands goes in search of the truth and leaves no stone unturned. He investigates the Nazi sympathisers who helped Wächter in his final months. These range from a Vatican bishop who facilitated the exfiltration of high-level Nazis such as Josef Mengele, to an enigmatic Prussian lady who visited Otto as he lay dying. In addition, Sands weighs up a number of possible outcomes. Was Otto poisoned? Did he actually make it to South America and employ a body double to throw his pursuers off the scent? Or did he save his skin by becoming a spy for the Americans?
Sands has scoured numerous sources, in particular Charlotte’s vast trove of letters, notebooks and journals. His many interviewees include war veterans, John le Carré, and the last survivor of the group saved by Oskar Schindler. And then of course there is poor deluded Horst, who persists in telling Sands in each of their meetings that his father was that rare thing, a good Nazi. For Horst, Otto was an “endangered heretic” in the National Socialist system, vehemently against the racial acts carried out on his turf.
The story becomes a little bogged by down in places by the sheer weight of detail. Snippets from Otto and Charlotte’s correspondence are edifying, but do we really need a whole paragraph devoted to their discussion on how best to eliminate bed bugs? Elsewhere, however, we come across seemingly mundane detail which in actual fact speaks volumes. Here is Wächter grumbling to his wife about the lack of manual labour: “The Jews are being deported in increasing numbers, and it’s hard to get powder for the tennis court.” And this is how Horst responds when Sands finds a copy of Mein Kampf hidden on a shelf in his castle: “I didn’t know I had that!”
Sands’s remarkable book shines a vital light on a dark chapter of twentieth-century history and the hazy last movements of a desperate fugitive. Although it grimly reminds us of the evil that men do, it also reinforces the fundamental need for justice.
“The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive” by Philippe Sands is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
