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The Last Nazi
by Andrew Turpin.
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If one is a fan of Frederick Forsyth, or enjoys his worjs, one may safely bet one may like this, even though it's a much simpler, paler version of the original's deep and wide research and complexity of plots one is used to, from ODESSA File and Day of the Jackal onwards. Not that earlier works, if any, were less - just that, these two were the first one recalls having come across.
What with the nazi chase, in fact, one is reminded more than once of The ODESSA File, and there's the parent angle too for good measure- except that, here there's more than one survivor, and a very questionable angle too, of Jews vs church, via forgiveness on one side (claiming virtue, for most people, and then insisting on justice for all victims), while other side is painted with tar, consorting with the devil that's the nazis.
Another difference is that, in The ODESSA File, the back story comes much sooner, securing the reader's sympathy for holocaust victims and more, while here that's taken care of via a prologue, and a substantial diary appears much later, although in early stages there's another memoir, both private.
And a major difference between the two, The ODESSA File on one hand and this on the other, is how Frederick Forsyth has his protagonist casually explain that his pursuit had nothing to do with holocaust but was personal, on one hand, while here Andrew Turpin repeatedly paints the Jewish victims with tar brushes, including the early murdered troubled informer who's painted in questionable hues towards end. Forsyth's witness victim remains a sympathetic, pristine figure to the end, in contrast.
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The story begins with an incident in midst of holocaust involving a tunnel collapse where camp inmates were being used in Southern Poland to carry and stash heavy boxes, before a pair often brothers manage to escape from a train and hear others being shot. This is prologue, before the story opens in Washington DC to a fundraiser attended by a nephew and son of the escaped twins, his brother being the candidate. He's found stabbed to death in his hotel room, but nit before he's talked to an investigator and a journalist about the nazi connection of funds.
So far so good. But suddenly the author's antisemitism comes through, talking about the dead mother of the investigator who had been in the same camp as the twins.
"Helena had been eventually released when the Red Army arrived in April 1945, just after her twentieth birthday. Although originally a Jew, she later became a Christian ... "
"Although"??? Sounds like he's describing a blind person achieving dressing oneself! Reminds one obe Donelly in his work on Atlantis describing Chinese as having acquired racial characteristic faults of shapes of nose and eyes during migration!
Perhaps it's to assure that the protagonist is kosher, despite the story being about Jews persecution and murders by nazis, including in US in the new millennium? That it's not about opposite persecution by Jews for avenging the holocaust, beyond justice? Or even just reassuring an average reader in US that the author is one of them?
Reality is that most survivors managed to live only by never mentioning what they had suffered, although the family would know bare facts thereof, until they were old, with grown children and grandchildren, before some of them wrote their memoirs.
"Johnson had been shocked when he read it for the first time. He had never known it had existed until then, and although his mother used to talk a bit about the camps and tell the occasional story about how the Nazis treated the Jews back then, she never did so in graphic detail. He hadn’t read the manuscript since probably 2002."
And most, at that, are probably not published, but kept private by family, if found. Few have consented to publications, or other measures of going public such as organisations bringing people together, and that, reluctantly.
It's really not different from women being able to speak about domestic violence suffered by most.
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" ... You had another lecture, right? What was this one about?”
"“It was about the controversy when the CIA employed a lot of ex-Nazis after World War II to spy for them,” Johnson said. “Many of the Nazis knew a lot about Russia, which were the new enemy then. Lots of them were given entry into the U.S. as a payback. They were given a safe haven here, no questions asked, a few thousand of them—mass murderers, torturers, sadists, you name it. My talk was partly about how the OSI was set up in 1979 inside the Department of Justice in Washington to track down those Nazis, who were scattered across the country.”"
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"The cruelty of the SS camp commanders was indescribable, unfathomable. I could not work out how such depths of cold hatred and savagery could exist in a person. Any excuse to beat one of us, any reason conjured out of nowhere, any minor fabricated indiscretion—they would grab it, a horrible thin smile on their lips. Inflicting pain, agony, humiliation, and then eventually death, was their daily reason for living.
"For them it was the only way to be. To follow orders and to cause pain.
"Did they have a choice? Of course they did. And they chose the way of darkness always."
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" ... Brenner stopped in front of me, about half a meter away.
"He squared his shoulders, his feet apart, and put his hands behind his back, holding his black leather riding crop whip, which he used to lash us with. His words to me were “You—you never look me in the eye, do you?” Then he repeated them, shouting at the top of his voice, screaming. He said it was disrespectful to avoid eye contact and that he was going to teach me some manners. Then he turned to one of the Jewish kapos, the Jews who had either volunteered or had been told to do certain jobs to help the guards, and told him to fetch the ox whip.
"I was shaking with fear because I had previously seen the first lieutenant whipping prisoners with it while they were held motionless on a whipping block.
"Now it was my turn. The guards called this torture the fünfundzwanzig, German for “twenty-five,” because it involved that number of strokes with the whip across the buttocks. I’ve never felt such pain, and even now, I can’t put into words how it felt.
"Then and now, I’ve no idea how I avoided fainting, but I think this was the only thing that kept me alive, because if I had lost consciousness while the first lieutenant was beating me, I’m certain I would have been shot. That’s what happened to others.
"Afterward the guards were instructed to leave me standing in the Appell yard, where the daily roll call of prisoners was taken, for a whole day in the sun without food or water, and that no one must speak to me, and I mustn’t sit or lie down.
"And that’s what happened. It was summer, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky for the whole day. I must have been very close to death. I had blood running down my legs from the whip, and I was horribly sunburned on my head and hands and feet, in utter agony.
"I was unconscious for quite some time toward the end. I must finally have passed out; I don’t know how long for.
"Afterward I developed some sort of infection from the whip wounds and even today bear those scars. The camp doctor came to look at me. He could do nothing, or wanted to do nothing."
And again, there's a thorn, a foreign seeming insertion.
"But I prayed to the Almighty while I was out in that Appell yard, and he spoke back to me and told me I would live. And I did, somehow. He also told me I was loved and had to forgive those SS commanders for what they had done, or I would go mad.
"And that was true. I had a sudden realization that inside me, I couldn’t choose my circumstances, but I could choose my response.
"That is how I survived the whipping and how I survived Wüstegiersdorf.
"Yet those who perpetrated these crimes, even if forgiven, must face justice."
This double twist is unnatural, typical of church in its protection of criminals from victims, on one hand, and of persecution of subjugated races in name of justice on the other.
Most memoirs speak of nightmares, inability to forget, and need yo get back to life. Having read well over a dozen, one can't recall a single one that speaks of forgiveness, much less of a double twist as author has the victim here for.
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"He turned around to his computer. There were two new e-mails sitting in his inbox: one from the assistant school principal’s wife, which he ignored, and one from the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, set up by the famous Nazi hunter of the same name. It was announcing the organization’s 2011 Annual Status Report on the Worldwide Investigation and Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals, the latest update of a document first published in 2001.
"The report included a list of the most wanted former Nazis. The numbers on the list had dwindled sharply over recent years, due mainly to death from old age, with the odd successful prosecution to celebrate.
"Johnson scanned through it, tapping the desk with his fingers. Yes, the names were still there.
"Those bastards from Wüstegiersdorf had never been caught."
True of most of them!
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The descriptions of incidents in career of Johnson, the protagonist, in his past as a CIA operative stationed in Pakistan and developing contacts in Afghanistan in 1988, seems to evoke Zero Dark Thirty as well as parts of Homeland. Perhaps that's because they're all based on real events and characters.
Interestingly, author goes into use of nazis by CIA, and possibly protection given to them, even from OSI.
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Author mentions "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", the film. It's unusual respect paid to a fellow author, so one wonders if they're related.
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There's an uncanny feeling, beginning soon past the prologue, somewhere around when Johnson and Fiona meet Nathaniel first, of being in The Neverending Story, of the terrifying wolf woken and being on the chase.
Perhaps it merely testifies to the eternal quality of The Neverending Story, rather than an unconscious effect on the author.
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Not relevant to the plot, but brings much to mind -
" ... “The U.S. President Barack Obama flew into London’s Stansted Airport last night to be greeted by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.
"President Obama, who is traveling with his wife, Michelle, will hold an initial meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron at 10 Downing Street this evening.
"It is only the third state visit to the U.K. by a U.S. President in the past 100 years.
"Obama, followed by a large U.S. press entourage . . . ”"
This was, of course, a few years before the last wedding in the family, with the substitute in tears as he escorted the bride to be given in marriage to his youngest.
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It's almost halfway before story returns to events leading to opening of prologue.
"All the commanders were terrified of Lutkemeyer’s boss, the top man, Captain Karl Beblo, who was a fearsome character with the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen. Beblo was the local commandant of the Third Reich’s civil and military engineering group, the Organisation Todt.
"The Todt, together with the Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer, had decided that Książ Castle in Walbrzych (or Waldenburg, as the Germans called it) should be turned into a headquarters for Hitler.
"I and other Poles hated the way the Germans had many decades earlier taken over the whole Lower Silesia region, originally part of the Kingdom of Poland. By the time Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, they saw it as their own.
"Speer and his team planned to build a complex of tunnels under the beautiful old castle: a bolt-hole where the Führer could flee if the war went against Germany. A place beyond the range of British and American bombers.
"They also planned to build more tunnels under the hills on which the castle stood, as well as under the Owl Mountains, which ran for twenty-six kilometres southeast from Walbrzych.
"The idea was to use them as underground factories to produce sensitive and highly secret new weapons and other military technology.
"The code name for this scheme was Project Riese—German for “giant.”
"To build the tunnels, the Nazis brought in a small army of mining engineers.
"But the actual digging, the dangerous bit, was carried out by concentration camp prisoners like Daniel and me.
"Most of us were Jews, but there were also a few Slavs and other minorities. We were all kept at Gross-Rosen, the network of camps that included Wüstegiersdorf.
"The SS cut corners and had no regard for safety. Thousands of the prisoners died, both in the camps and while digging the tunnels. Concrete supports weren’t put in place, and tunnel roofs were often unstable. We all knew there were many fatal accidents, all involving Jews. Even the SS guards and commanders were worried, because they had to supervise us.
"Lutkemeyer said it was important the work that was to be done that day at the Sokolec tunnels be completed quickly, otherwise the Führer would be angry. This made me take notice.
"I heard Lutkemeyer say there was a special delivery of boxes coming, which had to be stowed in Sub-Tunnel A, running off Tunnel Three. That was bad news because although there was a narrow-gauge railway that ran up to the entrance to Tunnel Three, if anything needed to be transported farther, we had to carry it by hand. Tunnel Three was a disaster waiting to happen. They had built it into soft sandstone, and it wasn’t as stable as some of the other tunnels across the mountain range. The SS were so concerned, they had a couple of small escape tunnels built, one of which I worked on.
"There were six guards that day, which surprised me. Normally, there were just two or three. They loaded twenty-two of us onto a truck, then drove us to the railway station, herded us into two cattle trucks pulled by an old shunting engine, and then took us the thirteen kilometres down the valley to the village of Ludwikowice Klodzkie.
"Brenner, to his obvious distaste, had been forced to travel with us.
"From there, a smaller train took us on the narrow-gauge railway a couple of kilometres up to the tunnel complex in the hills near the village of Sokolec.
"A little later, at just before ten o’clock, another Nazi train, pulling five trucks loaded with wooden boxes, chugged up to the Sokolec tunnel entrance, accompanied by heavily armed SS guards.
"Our job was to unload the train and carry the heavy boxes far into the tunnels complex, where we had to stack them on pallets."
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"His thesis, which he still had at home in Portland, included details of how, for most of the war, Hitler’s regime had bolstered its thin foreign-exchange reserves, vital to purchasing equipment, machinery, and engineering products, by plundering the gold reserves of the various countries it had marched into. In all, an estimated $600 million of gold at 1945 prices had been looted from the central banks in Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and others. Most of it was melted down and reformed by the Reichsbank into new one-kilogram gold bars.
"Johnson turned on his phone calculator app and punched in a few numbers. That was something like $30 billion at 2011 prices, he thought.
"He had also done research into how, in late 1944 and early 1945, when the Russians were advancing rapidly west and the Americans and British moving east, the crumbling Third Reich scrambled to hide the treasure it had plundered.
"Much of it was stored in disused mines. Some was dropped to the bottom of lakes.
"But now it seemed that from what Jacob had written, some of it was also hidden in the tunnels of the Riese complex."
And that's before mentioning France, looted majorly, or Jews, ditto.
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" ... But when they heard nineteen shots, they knew Brenner had killed them all—something that was confirmed much later. After that, there was only one line left in the narrative, a couple of pages from the end of the notebook.
""I knew then he would have to pay the price, that there would have to be justice. "
"Johnson put the notebook down and rested in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
"A Nazi gold train."
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"“That man saved our life and must have put his own at risk. After a while, we went over the Czech border and came to another few houses on the other side of the hills. We went to one of them, where a man took us into his attic. By that stage, we just couldn’t go any farther—Daniel especially. He was totally done in.
"“We were shocked to find two British guys there in the attic as well, both of them airmen. They were escaped prisoners of war, dressed in German clothing and with proper German ID documents. They told us they’d escaped from Stalag 344, a prisoner of war camp about a hundred kilometers northeast, and that they were planning to head south through Czechoslovakia and Germany to Switzerland. We waited a few days until we felt a little stronger, and the Poles found us some better clothing, money for the trains, and fake documents stating we were Belgian laborers. Then we just went with the two British. We followed them at a distance so if we got caught, they wouldn’t be pulled in as well.
"“We got to Singen, near the German-Swiss border, and then just walked about thirty kilometers, following the railway line to Schaffhausen, ducking through the woods and getting over the border near Ramsen.”
"From Switzerland, the twins had passed into southern France, where the French Resistance helped them pass through Toulouse and Perpignan, then over the Pyrenees and into Spain, where they parted company with the two British airmen.
"From there, Spain, which in practice remained neutral during the war, allowed them to cross into Portugal, another neutral country. They eventually got onto a ship from Lisbon to London in February 1945.
One would find it unbelievable, if one hadn't read accounts by so many survivors.
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Another ODESSA moment with a difference -
"“I guess my mother is one reason I’m here,” Johnson said. “For a long time I was a Nazi hunter in the U.S., as you said. That was partly because of my mother’s experience in Wüstegiersdorf, which you both seem to have shared.
"“But there’s something else. In 1996, I was searching for an SS captain, Jan Van Stalheim, whom I tracked to Buenos Aires, where the trail went cold. He’d vanished. But I had a tip that he visited a jeweler in Buenos Aires a few times, someone I meant to go and check out but never did—a man called José Guzmann.”
"Johnson studied the brothers’ faces. “Does that name mean anything to you?”"
"Daniel gazed steadily at Johnson. “His real name wasn’t José Guzmann at all. It was actually a man called Erich Brenner—the former commander at Wüstegiersdorf.”"
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"A life spent exiled under a false name with a false passport, in a country he hated, a wife who had left him at the same time as his only son, a business that was going down the tubes, no real friends, and the constant fear of discovery. Overhanging it all was the sense, not of guilt—there was none of that—but of failure that had spread through him like a vicious cancer, seemingly untreatable."
Fiction, there. Most escaped nazis fared as well as possible, considering their inhuman acts in holocaust and dehumanizing effect thereof on perpetrators, that is, if they'd had any humanity in the first place, ever.
"Still, he was lucky to have gotten out of Nazi Germany, he thought. The narrow window of opportunity to escape to Spain, the help he’d received from Otto Skorzeny’s organization Die Spinne—The Spider—the new passport, the crash course in Spanish, the flight to Argentina.
"It could have been worse back then, and the biggest mercy of all was that he’d been able to work with the CIA, trading his knowledge of Russia and his wide range of contacts in the German army intelligence organizations—the Fremde Heere Ost, the Foreign Armies East, and the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization—for his freedom."
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"“You do know, Mr. Johnson, why we have been doing what we’ve been doing with Brenner and the gold?” Leopold said.
"Johnson nodded. “I get it completely.”
"“We could have had him killed, you know. But it’s not our belief as Jews, to take an eye for an eye, even if he does deserve it. It’s true that if you go and read Exodus chapter twenty-one, it does say how the Lord told Moses that anyone who kills another should be put to death, a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. However, we Jews don’t believe that should be taken literally, and our Talmud, our Jewish law, doesn’t interpret it that way. Nevertheless, we do believe damages should be paid in full. That’s what we have been doing: extracting compensation. Jacob calls it redemption. Reverse redemption.”"
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" ... it looks like Brenner was on our payroll for a long time in the ’50s and ’60s, even running into the ’70s. He provided contacts among the SS’s old spy network in Russia, where he seems to have been well connected, and passed on information from these contacts about Russia’s military capabilities: details about the so-called missile gap between Russia and the U.S. It went on for a long time and must have been enough to build a lot of credit with the CIA. ... "
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"Dated the sixth of October 1942, the memo was congratulatory in tone and came from the SS Personalhauptamt, which Johnson knew was the SS Personnel Main Office. It informed Brenner that he was being promoted to the rank of Obersturmführer. It stated this was for Brenner’s role with the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, the Death’s Head Division, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. It referenced the part played by the Totenkopf, a tank unit, during the advance on Leningrad during 1942. There were several official stamps on the memo, one of which showed the SS eagle above a swastika—the official SS symbol.
"The second letter, also typewritten and dated the second of November 1943, was again from the Personalhauptamt, detailing Brenner’s appointment as deputy commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp following an injury sustained at Kharkhov in March 1943. It didn’t specify the injury, but Daniel had mentioned Brenner having a limp."
"The fourth letter had two joint signatories: first the Personalhauptamt, and second Hauptsturmführer Karl Beblo. But this letter, dated December 21, 1944, had a very different tone.
"It was clearly a severe reprimand issued to Brenner and outlined details of an escape three days earlier, the eighteenth of December, by two Jews from a railway car en route from Ludwikowice Klodzkie to Gluszyca. It also accused Brenner of shooting dead—without authorization—nineteen Jewish prisoners who were fit for work. The memo noted the two escaped Jews had not been found."
"Thank God for Hans Huber, Johnson thought, for the umpteenth time in his career. Huber was the manager of the Wirth paper mill at Freimann, near Munich, where in April 1945, the Nazi leadership sent the entire collection of ten million membership card files for the worldwide Nazi Party to be pulped, just as the Second World War came toward a close.
"But Huber defied the Nazi leadership and managed to hide the documents under waste paper until U.S. Army archival experts were able to secure them in October of that year. They were subsequently transferred by the Americans to a Berlin document center, and microfilmed copies were made for use at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. These documents had been the bedrock on which many interviews and prosecutions of Nazi war criminals were founded, including at the Nuremberg trials, and had been a goldmine of evidence for the OSI in its work."
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"“The whole objective here is to get the guy to court. If you start running stories before he’s been arrested he’ll go underground like a rat down a sewer pipe. He’ll get a new passport, a change of identity and just disappear. That’s what these guys have always done. They’re survivors. There are still networks in place to protect his sort, you know, even now, almost seventy years later. They’ll just whisk him away.”"
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"The Sokolec tunnels complex is inside the Gontowa Mountain and comprises four tunnels built by slave labor, mainly Jews who were imprisoned in the nearby Gross-Rosen concentration camp.
"Tunnels One and Two are built into soft sandstone and have collapsed in several places. Tunnel Three is half a kilometer away from the others but has been inaccessible since the end of World War II because of a collapsed tunnel roof. The Sokolec complex is not accessible to tourists, who are advised to visit the nearby Underground City of Osówka to experience the Riese tunnels in safety."
" ... Owl Mountains now, running west of Walbryzch, and Johnson noted the occasional brown tourist sign flashing up in his headlights, pointing to some of the Nazi tunnel complexes open to the public. Podziemne Miasto Osówka, read one. Underground City of Osówka.
"Tours of the old tunnels. The locals were still trying to capitalize on the Nazi occupation seven decades earlier. Who could blame them? It was probably the closest they would get to compensation from the Third Reich for the virtual destruction of their country during the war and then the grim, gray repression of the Soviet era that followed, Johnson mused."
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"Inside the large compound formed by the wooden fence were several long wooden huts. Between them were areas of concrete on which stood steel tables.
"Working at the tables were dozens of emaciated women, all dark-skinned Latinas. They were dressed in ragged old T-shirts and jeans that were frayed and covered in stains.
"Piles of wristwatch cases, straps, mechanisms, and other components were spread on the tables, which some of the women were assembling under the gaze of men standing nearby.
"Other women at the end of the tables were sliding the finished products into plastic sleeves and small branded boxes.
"All the men carried wooden truncheons that hung from loops tied to their belts. Johnson noticed that frequently, if one of the women stopped working, one of the supervisors would step forward and speak angrily to them. Sometimes they would take out their truncheon and threaten the women.
"In the center of the compound was a water tap on a stand, with a couple of metal cups chained to it that clinked together as they moved in the breeze. Occasionally one of the women would walk to the stand, fill a cup with water, and drink.
"Johnson took a couple more steps. He could see the watches and the boxes carried the names of famous brands: Rolex, Girard-Perregaux, Omega, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and others.
"Ignacio spoke from behind him. “All fakes, mostly for sale to tourists in this country and elsewhere. And these people are all trafficked in from other countries around here: Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile. They are all slaves, basically. They are kept in this compound, they live and work in these huts, and they’re not allowed out. They don’t get much food, and what they do get is rubbish.”
"Ignacio walked around in front of Johnson, still pointing the gun at him. “And this is how my father has been making his money for decades. Trying to make up for the losses on his gold purchases from our friends,” he hissed the words out, “the Kudrow brothers.”
"What really struck Johnson was how thin, filthy, and haunted the women looked. None of them spoke to the others. Some of the girls were very young, in their mid-to-late teens, and none of them looked much older than thirty. And all this in South America’s second largest economy? He swore under his breath.
"“It’s outrageous,” Johnson said, turning to Ignacio. “This is a concentration camp. He’s re-created one right here.”
"Ignacio continued, “You’re right. It is outrageous. My father’s legacy. I only found out about this place a few months ago. Oh yes, Argentina signed up for the United Nations protocols on human trafficking and all that political crap—sounds good, doesn’t it? But in reality, you find bastards like him running businesses like this all over the country.”
"Ignacio spat on the ground. “The police do nothing in return for a few bribes here, a roll of pesos there, sometimes a little favor or two. It’s the same all over South America, for that matter. Here. Look at it.”
"He gestured with his hand at the compound, then indicated to one of the women. “Just a girl, isn’t she? Fifteen years old.”
"She had come from Bolivia, Ignacio went on, and it had probably cost his father only eighty dollars or so to buy her. The manager would keep her here for maybe five years, ruin her life, then let her go, Ignacio said."
"“You might think I’m a hypocrite,” Ignacio said. “Well, fair enough. Everyone’s a hypocrite in this country. But this was how he treated me as a kid, more or less.” Ignacio said. “He locked me in cupboards if I misbehaved, beat me, verbally abused me, told me I was never going to do anything with my life.”
"Ignacio took a breath, then continued his rant. “That’s why I left home and joined the army to fight against the arrogant British in the Malvinas. But now it’s time for justice to be done. A little late, some may think. You do realize I was lucky to catch him, don’t you? He was on the point of disappearing again. When I arrived at his house, there was a new Chilean passport on his table, a new identity, and he had a bag packed and was ready to go.”"
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"Daniel had been stunned into silence by news of the concentration camp set up by Brenner in Puerto Iguazú and Ignacio’s line that Brenner had done it to try and make up for the financial hit taken from the Kudrows’ long-running blackmail. But he had ended the conversation with a comment that Johnson found hard to disagree with. “The man is pure evil; he would have done it anyway.”"
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Author mentions some references.
" ... great insight into the OSI’s operations and into some of the high-profile Nazi cases it pursued during the period after it was established in 1979. Since then, the OSI has won cases against 107 individuals living in the U.S. who took part in Nazi crimes of persecution. The document also illustrates how the United States provided a safe haven for hundreds, possibly thousands, of Nazis who fled after World War II, some of them assisted by the CIA in exchange for intelligence about the Soviet Union as the Cold War escalated."
"Lichtblau’s book, The Nazis Next Door, about the war criminals who took refuge in the United States after World War II and the efforts of the Office of Special Investigations and others to track them down, is a fascinating read. In particular, the chapter detailing OSI historian Mike MacQueen’s hunt in the Vilnius archives for evidence of crimes committed by Aleksandras Lileikis, a Lithuanian security police chief who collaborated with the Nazis and subsequently lived in Massachusetts for thirty-five years, makes compelling reading."
"From 2015 to 2016 there were extensive efforts to locate and excavate a train rumored to contain gold and jewelry that was supposedly abandoned and buried by the Nazis in a secret railway tunnel just outside Walbrzych at the end of the war. Attempts to locate this train have so far proved unsuccessful. There was a fascinating BBC documentary about this in October 2016, Hunting the Nazi Gold Train, by historian and broadcaster Dan Snow, which provided much rich detail on Project Riese. ... "
"The flight by hundreds, or more likely, thousands of Nazis to South America after World War II is well documented, although there is disagreement among some historians about the numbers and methods used to engineer their escape routes. In particular, Uki Goñi’s book, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, gives a well-researched insight into how the relationship between Hitler’s Germany and Juan Perón’s Argentina facilitated this.
"Another similarly well-researched book is Guy Walters’ Hunting Evil."
And he acknowledges debt to Frederick Forsyth.
" ... Of these, one of the best-known is Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File, which detailed the Odessa escape network established by some SS officers at the end of World War II. Some historians, such as Guy Walters, have downplayed or even denied the existence of a network by that name."
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April 02, 2022 - April 05, 2022.
Purchased
Kindle Edition, 506 pages
Published August 15th 2017
by The Write Direction Publishing
Edition language English Original title The Last Nazi
ASIN:- B074V5XNPF
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The Last Nazi:
a WW2 spy conspiracy thriller
(A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1)
Kindle Edition
by Andrew Turpin
(Author)
Format: Kindle Edition
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4644269401
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