RATLINE:

The author's grandfather, Leon Buchholz, lived in the Ukrainian town of Lviv, where his family was obliterated in the Holocaust. At the time of his grandfather's birth, Lviv was called Lemberg and was a regional capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Sands has told his family's story in the acclaimed East West Street, and this book is a continuation of the themes. Hans Frank, governor general of German-occupied Poland, gave a speech in Lemberg in 1942 that resulted in the extermination of the 4 million Jews of Galicia. Frank was later executed, and researching his family history Sands made contact with Frank's son Niklas who mentioned Otto Wächter, his father's deputy. Niklas introduced him to Wächter's son Horst and this gripping story of historical detection is based largely on what Horst was able to tell him about Wächter's activities during the war and attempts to escape afterwards using the Nazis' Ratline to Argentina. Horst regarded his father as a man doing his best, but the story uncovered by Sands reveals that in Vienna in 1938 he "cleansed" over 16,000 civil servants from office on grounds of being Mischlings (half-Jewish) or having a Jewish spouse. Letters by Wächter's devoted wife Charlotte express enthusiastic Nazi sympathies, and of the Anschluss she wrote "Every Nazi felt such joy about this miracle". As governor of Galicia from 1943 Wächter often found himself at odds with his superiors but he was directly responsible for extensive ghettoisation and the transportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal held him responsible for his mother's death. After the war Wächter went into hiding and died suddenly of an infection in a religious house in Rome in 1949. In 2017 Sands personally met the man Buko who had hidden Otto in the mountains on his way to access the escape route. 417pp, photos.