What if your father or mother had done something terribly wrong? How would you feel about it? How would you rationalise their actions? Would you even wish to defend them? How might your decision to do so (or otherwise) affect the clarity of your conscience, the integrity of your thought, the conduct of your behaviour, indeed the fabric of your entire moral universe?
Maybe you, reader, have already known this predicament. Or perhaps you, like so many, have simply evolved from the childhood perspective of looking up to your parents as magical, all-providing superbeings to the mature understanding that they are actually the flawed and non-omniscient creatures their worldly circumstances reveal them to be. Just like you.
The notion that one brand of person could somehow be superhuman, or above others, giants among men, is merely mythological – Nietzsche aside, it is as absurd as it is infantile.
Yet the psychological and emotional adjustment to such an unforgiving truth must be even more difficult to swallow when the parent was once an “important” figure of high rank, esteemed by peers at the peak of their power, and essentially unknown to the child in any personal capacity. Even more so when they are later deemed a war criminal. This must have been the case for Horst Wächter, youngest offspring of SS Brigadefüher Otto Freiherr von Wächter, governor of Galicia, a Nazi-occupied territory incorporating parts of Poland and Ukraine during the second World War. Under Otto’s authority, hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were deported or killed (or both), among them ancestors of Philippe Sands QC, author of the book under review.
Sands is a professor of law at UCL and a prominent international human rights barrister. His career contacts fortuitously led him to make acquaintance with Horst Wächter, a man most keen to vindicate his father’s wartime dealings, to establish nothing less than the truth (as he sees it): that his since maligned father was essentially a decent fellow whose governance was humane. Sands shares in Horst’s express desire for historical veracity; but while his own family history would suggest some emotional investment in the subject matter, as a legal scholar with no ignominy looming over his family name his immediate motivations are presumably less coloured than those of his acquaintance.
The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive is the outcome of Sands’s meticulous and startling research, revealing a truly labyrinthine investigation. This intriguing history charts the career of Otto von Wächter from his beginnings as an ambitious civil servant during the rise of National Socialism in Austria, to his assumption of the governance of Galicia under Hitler – mandating construction of the Kraków ghetto and supervising numerous other atrocities – then his flight into hiding atop the Austrian Alps for three years after the collapse of the regime; following which, a perilous nocturnal mountain crossing into Italy, final destination Rome, where he finds asylum under the dubious protection of a Vatican bishop.
In tandem, Sands also tracks the interweaving narrative of stalwart love and devoted correspondence between Otto and his remorselessly fascistic wife, Charlotte, an anchor of fidelity amid his increasingly fugitive and treacherous existence. The cognitive dissonance evoked by Charlotte’s awareness of her husband’s “work” side by side with her diary entries listing frivolous cultural pursuits reaches a level of criminal denial that makes for chilling reading. Meanwhile, Horst’s enduring love for his mother, as much as any filial duty, is revealed to account for much of the obdurate insistence upon his father’s relative innocence.
‘Nest of spies’
The first half of the book deals chiefly with blind love and blinder power in wartime Europe – the vicissitudes of Otto’s career and the integral influence of his spouse – while the second delves deeply into the intrigues of post-war Rome’s counterintelligence community, a breeding ground for early cold war espionage. In the three months that Otto took refuge in the Eternal City, always with the intention to abscond to South America via the notorious “Ratline” – a “Reich migratory route” that facilitated transatlantic fugitives – he unwittingly wandered into a veritable “nest of spies”. To say that the surrounding webs of intrigue were convoluted and clandestine would be grossly to understate the case.
Much of the thrill of Sands’s detection trail revolves around teasing out the many byzantine threads of deceit woven by American and Soviet agents active in the “denazification” or “turning” of former fascists to their own agenda in the new ideological war. Indeed, one of the more shocking revelations the book provokes is that the Ratline was not only known to, and even sanctioned by, the Americans, but plausibly established by them as a means to convey former Nazis to the Americas with a view to recruiting individuals who could still be useful to the anti-communist cause.
Sands closes his book with a remark from a friend, the Spanish writer, Javier Cercas, who proposes that “it is more important to understand the butcher than the victim”, flipping the well-worn winners-write-history maxim on its head. This can be read as a thinly veiled allusion to the “Butcher of Lemberg”, Otto von Wächter; but it gently invites us to bear witness to further atrocities, real or potential, in our own era.
Sands’s astute deductions, drawn from extensive documentary resources in state archives and private letters, tie together the multiple strands of this narrative with considerable aplomb. The Ratline is a very fine work of what could be termed investigative history. While the sheer deluge of detail and nuanced interconnections can at times be oversaturating, somewhat slowing the pace of the narrative, the investment of effort required of the reader is fully justified by the reward. Legal eagles, lovers of spy novels, sleuths of unsolved mysteries, and aficionados of Nazi lore will all draw much from this thoroughly immersive and edifying read. A marathon more than a sprint, but the slog is well worth it.
