Unravelling a troubling Nazi legacy

HISTORY
The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive
Philippe Sands
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $39.95

In 2010, English human rights lawyer, academic and author of East West Street, Philippe Sands, travelled to Lviv, Ukraine, to lecture on "crimes against humanity" and to search for the home of his grandfather, Leon Buchholz.

Buchholz had lost all but one of his extended family when they were murdered in 1943 along with the 3500 other Jewish people in the nearby woods on a single spring day on the orders of Hans Frank, the Governor General of German-occupied Poland. Their deaths had been overseen by one of Frank's deputies, Otto von Wachter, then Nazi governor of District of Galicia.

In Lviv, or Lemberg as his grandfather knew it, Sands came into the orbit of Hans Frank's son, Niklas, with whom he discussed their unimaginably bleak connection and Niklas' book, about the burden shouldered by the son of a mass murderer. The meeting produced an unlikely friendship, and a web of connections.

Hans Frank was responsible for the deaths of 4 million Jews, for which he was convicted and hanged at Nuremberg. He was unloved and reviled by his son who, as an adult, believed capital punishment to be abhorrent, with the exception of his father's case.

Niklas Frank brokered a difficult peace with his father, he told Sands, because he acknowledged his father's crimes but he knew that Horst von Wachter – son of Otto, promoted by Hitler to SS-Gruppenfuhrer in 1944, one rank below the Reichsfuhrer, and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles – had not. Did Sands care to meet him?

Otto von Wachter had eluded capture after the war, hiding for years in the Austrian Alps before fleeing to Rome where, in the post-war swamp of double agents and incipient Cold War machinations, he died in mysterious circumstances awaiting Vatican assistance to escape via the Ratline. Tracing Wachter's demise stretches Sands and his researchers and occupies, like an engrossing crime novel, the second half of his book.

But it's the first half that has the sharpest hooks. "I felt a sense of anxiety," Sands admits, with stunning understatement, on his way to meet Horst in his baroque castle outside Vienna, and with good cause.

Horst, "tall and attractive … genial", is eager to press his father's case, even to a descendant of his victims; to his mind, his father was "decent, an optimist, who tried to do good but who got caught up in the horrors occasioned by others". He's not a denialist. He declares the Holocaust "wrong, period", but he cannot allow that his father bears any responsibility.

Possessing detailed documentation confirming the contrary – among them Otto von Wachter's authorisation of the Krakow ghetto and his indictment for the shooting of more than 100,000 people – and in spite of Horst's promotions to him of obscene dissonances and manipulations of fact, Sands holds his silence, gains Horst's trust. This superhuman sangfroid will yield, for critical scrutiny, the von Wachter family's entire, extensive archive of personal papers.

They include years of correspondence between Otto and his wife, Charlotte, "a Nazi to the day she died", some 40 years after the Reich's end, and her diaries. They chronicle not only insider knowledge of the Reich, but the shadow-world of their marital and family relationships and their privileges and social life.

Sands persuades Horst to deliver the papers, plus family photo albums, into the care of a US Holocaust museum. Then he mines them for himself. Chronologically matching letters and diary entries, Sands juxtaposes Otto's workdays and Charlotte's diary entries, illuminating the pair's terrifying, dissociative void.

In 1941, as Otto signs decrees prohibiting Jews from employment and paves the way for the "liquidation" of more than 500,000 human beings, Charlotte records her "enormous joy" and pride in his "humane and good governance". As Otto pursues a murderous agenda, Charlotte tends to her "unspeakably beautiful home". He, stressed, becomes "ill, his teeth rotted". She, bored, falls for Hans Frank. "I wore Frank's boots',' she writes, delirious. "I breathed in his air … I am so in love … thank God no one knows." Otto bemoans the consequences of his own efforts. "A lack of manual labour," he complains to Charlotte. "The Jews are being deported in increasing numbers, and it's hard to get powder for the tennis court."

In adulthood, Horst explains to Sands, he "dropped out of normality … because of his father's story", in order to "disappear into the woods". But even his sylvan reflections do not persuade him of his father's historical responsibility, and his approach to his father, as a man with good intentions who "bore no criminal guilt", turns pathologically stubborn in Sands' company. As Horst doubles down, the author tries to shift his thinking. "It was a game of double advocacy," Sands notes, "that would run for years."

Horst, a profoundly disturbing person, whose Nazi childhood and broken filial attachments have warped his character and intellect, seems to have compartmentalised his adult psyche into two irreconcilable blocks: infantile longing versus reality and historical truth.

Horst becomes, for Sands and the reader, a grotesque figure, a man so stricken with personal pathology and historical blindness, so damaged by infantile grief and loss, that he cannot be appealed to, reasoned with or understood, for which he can be neither forgiven nor loved. His psychic split has rendered him monstrous, too.

Sands' courage, intellectual largesse and transcendent curiosity, electrify this book. By its end, his patience is exhausted. Niklas Frank terminates his association with Horst, declaring him a Nazi. And a friend of the author validates his efforts with a "pretty", yet incontrovertible, statement: "It is more important to understand the butcher than the victim."

YOu can here a conversation between Mark Raphael Baker and Philippe Sands, recorded for Melbourne Jewish Book Week at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsj-8YXeUV8&feature=youtu.be