The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
My father, the Nazi war criminal
Laurence Rees admires Philippe Sands’s stunning investigation into an SS governor and his family
PTHE RATLINE by Philippe Sands 432pp, W&N, £20, ebook £9.99
hilippe Sands’s remarkable historical investigation tells two stories in parallel
– that of Otto Wächter, a dedicated Nazi who oversaw a whole series of atrocities during the war, alongside Sands’s own dealings with Wächter’s son, Horst. As a result the book has a great deal to tell us not just about the mentality of a committed Nazi perpetrator, but also the desire of human beings to take from the past only what is convenient for them.
Otto Wächter’s beliefs, though repellent, were straightforward. In March 1921 – at the age of 19 – he took part in a protest in his native Vienna calling for Jews to be “stripped of basic rights of citizenship and property”. Two years later, he joined the
Austrian branch of the Nazis, and in April 1932 he became a member of the SS. His girlfriend, Charlotte, supported his beliefs, writing that “all those Jews [in Vienna] wherever you go – they make me completely despair”. Her idea of a present for her boyfriend was a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, inscribed by her with the words: “Through struggle and love to the finish.”
After war broke out, Wächter served as Nazi governor of
Krakow in Poland and then as governor of the District of Galicia, now in western Ukraine. Both places were devastated by the Holocaust. Wächter helped set up the ghetto in Krakow, and during his time in Galicia, the Nazis sent thousands of Jews to the gas chambers of Belżec death camp. We can get an idea of Wächter’s attitude to all this from his note to Charlotte, by then his wife, saying that “the Jews are being deported in increasing numbers, and it’s hard to get powder for the tennis court”.
Has there been a greater example of casual callousness in history? Yes, the Jews are en route to a horrible fate, but let’s not lose sight of the real problem – the state of the tennis court.
You might think there’s not a lot of room for ambiguity here, and that Wächter was a war criminal of the deepest dye. But, as Sands discovers, that’s not what his son thinks. Horst Wächter – born in 1939 and named after the Nazi anthem the Horst Wessel Song
– refuses to accept the enormity of his father’s guilt. It’s not that Horst is a Holocaust denier; his denials only extend to his father’s complicity in the crimes. “I know the system was criminal, that my father was part of it,” says Horst. “But I don’t think of him as a criminal.”
Horst is prepared to hold to this quixotic view no matter what evidence Sands presents him with. When confronted, for instance, with photos of his father’s presence at the execution of 50 Polish hostages – murdered by the Nazis in an act of brutal revenge – Horst says that “my mother said somewhere that my father was very much against shooting [hostages] … I don’t think he felt very happy about that”.
Throughout the book, Horst remains a contradictory figure. On the one hand, he allows Sands access to the archive he has kept of his family’s papers – though Sands suspects that some of the key material has previously been weeded out by someone and “deposited into Lake Zell”. But on the other, he maintains that it’s significant that “there exists no document he [ie Horst’s father] signed to show that he ordered any death sentence”.
This, of course, is a spurious argument, since Sands’s exhaustive research demonstrates that Otto Wächter completely embraced Nazism. The letters that Otto and Charlotte sent to each other during the war, writes Sands, “offered no hint of personal difficulty, or any suggestion of unease about any aspects of the work in which Otto was engaged”.
“Nor did his SS file offer any indication of hesitation concerning his professional tasks. Life was good, Otto was on a fine, upward trajectory,” he continues.
The Ratline is a compelling piece of forensic historical research – one that is every bit as good as East West Street, Sands’s award-winning 2016 investigation into his family’s wartime history and the origins of the terms “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”. And as you read The Ratline, it’s impossible not to conclude that the only thing Otto Wächter was really unhappy about was that the Nazis lost the war. For it was at this point that his problems started. In an attempt to escape justice, he hid out for several years in the Austrian Alps, travelling between secluded hamlets and shelters high in the mountains. His wife managed to visit him every few weeks, and to keep his location secret.
In the summer of 1948, Wächter came down from the mountains and lodged in a “monastic establishment” in Rome, alongside Catholic monks. The following year he contracted a disease and
died. Bishop Huber, a cleric notorious for assisting fleeing Nazis to escape to South America via the infamous “Ratline”, was comforting him in hospital at the end.
At least, that’s the accepted version of what happened. Horst Wächter believes something very different – that his father did not die of natural causes, but was murdered. And so the last sections of the book detail Sands’s attempt to uncover the truth. He embarks on a fascinating journey, even travelling as far as New Mexico in search of the evidence. In the process, he exposes a murky world of spies and double agents, all flourishing amid the uncertainty of the post-war years, when the enemy was no longer Nazi Germany but Stalin’s
Soviet Union.
Sands’s detective work throws up a range of possible reasons for Wächter’s early death at the age of 48. But finally the opinion of the scientists he consults is decisive. And it’s hopefully not giving away too much of the ending of The Ratline to say that Horst Wächter doesn’t accept the conclusion that Sands reaches.
In the end, the key to Horst’s infuriating attitude probably lies in his confession that “I love my mother [who died in 1985], I have to do this, because of her.” But, ultimately, as Sands demonstrates in this stunning work, it’s highly dangerous to approach history that way. For, while you can deny the past, you can’t escape it.
The only thing that Otto Wächter really regretted was that the Nazis had lost the war
Laurence Rees’s latest book is The Holocaust: A New History (Penguin, £10.99)