A Nazi father – and an equally nasty mother
Like the Führer he served with unblinking loyalty, Otto Wächter was an Austrian. But unlike the ‘Austrian corporal’ – as President Hindenburg derisively called Hitler – Wächter (pictured) was very much of the officer class.
His father, Josef, a commander in the imperial army, was both ennobled and impoverished after the First World War.
In lieu of wealth, Josef passed on to Otto his nationalism, his antisemitism and his self-regard. These, along with his ambition and organisational skills, made Otto a great success in the eyes of his SS masters, as a governor in occupied Poland; and later, a hunted war criminal.
Otto’s story – his rise, precipitous fall and subsequent, thwarted efforts to flee Europe via the ‘Ratline’ of the title, an escape route to Latin America or the Middle East devised by Nazi sympathisers – is at the centre of this fascinating book.
Yet Otto is not its central character.
There are four principals here, and three key relationships.
There is Otto and his scarcely less repellent wife, Charlotte. There is their son, Horst, decent and kind, yet inexorably committed to apologism for his late parents. And there’s the author himself, who spends the book trying to bring Horst to the point of acknowledging Otto’s culpability.
The key relationship is perhaps that of Horst and Charlotte. That, Sands comes to realise, is where Horst’s devotion truly lies.
If Otto is hard to get a grip on as a personality – he is a man of action, most of it atrocious – then in Charlotte we find a monster painted in detail. She is callous, venal, self-pitying, feathering her nest with looted spoils, cosseting her brood while her husband sends other families to slaughter: a portrait of not only the banality, but the domesticity of evil.
Switching between the distant and very recent past, the book is episodic in nature, but this only makes it more compelling. It combines a mystery with a straight retelling of history – shining a light into one of the less investigated corners of the Nazi era and its aftermath – and a thoughtful inquiry into how we reckon with it.