Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice; by Gerald Steinacher.

Best to read the chapter titled Conclusion to begin with, although it appears just after half the book is over.

At the outset a couple of things are made clear by Steinacher - one, that this is book form of his degree work thesis; and second, that there never was an organisation named ODESSA, as described by Frederick Forsyth in his novel named after it, and since known even more due to the film based on the book. He repeatedly mentions various people including Simon Wiesenthal accepting existence of this organisation as a fact, and one is supposed to infer this was pretty silly, this author asserting over and over to the contrary.

This assertion is in line with the general denial suitable to nazis in particular, and therefore many Germans in general, but another writer, Alan Levy, on the topic - one who researched extensively, too, and probably being not connected to nazis in existence through twentieth century in Germany, Austria or South America in various nations, had little reason to deny the existence of the organisation - says the following in his book "Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File":-
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October 21, 2016
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Quoted from

Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File by Alan Levy:-


"ODESSA, in capital letters, is not the Soviet seaport where Simon Wiesenthal spent two years apprenticing as an architect and another year designing huts for chicken feathers, but an acronym for Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen: Organization of SS Members. As amorphous as the Mafia, which exists even when one cannot prove it exists, ODESSA, like the Cosa Nostra ‘families’, forms and re-forms to fit the occasion or need. Under such aliases as ‘Spider’, ‘Sluice’, ‘Silent Help’, ‘The Brotherhood’, ‘Association of German Soldiers’, ‘Comradeship’, or even ‘Six-Pointed Star’ (not the Star of David, but an escape network in Austria’s six principal cities), it denies its existence and shrugs off Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling 1972 thriller, The Odessa File, for the fiction it is, even though Forsyth’s novel features such real-life heroes as Simon Wiesenthal and Lord Russell of Liverpool as well as, for a villain, Eduard Roschmann, ‘The Butcher of Riga’ who, as second-in-command of the Latvian capital’s ghetto, was responsible for 35,000 deaths and deportations. In his foreword, Forsyth dissociates fiction from fact by pointing out that ‘many Germans are inclined to say that the ODESSA does not exist. The short answer is: it exists.’

Wiesenthal won’t waste his time or anyone else’s arguing this question. He insists ODESSA was founded in Augsburg or Stuttgart in 1947, when higher-ranking Nazis in the SS and wartime German industry saw that, despite Allied disinterest, the revelation of war crimes and the question of accountability were not going to die a quiet death. With the impending new state of Israel and dedicated survivors like Wiesenthal determined to keep the fires alive, the Fourth Reich wasn’t about to happen very soon. Using just a portion of their plunder, which Wiesenthal values at between $750 million and 1 billion, they were able to set up three escape routes: from the north German seaport of Bremen to the Italian seaport of Genoa, where Christopher Columbus was born and, centuries later, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele set sail for the New World: from Bremen to Rome, where the Vatican and the International Red Cross, wittingly or unwittingly, stood ready to expedite their escapes; and from Austria to Italy, which is the way Franz Stangl went."

"‘ODESSA provides its members with material aid, organizes social activities, and, when necessary, helps ex-Nazis escape to foreign countries,’ said prosecutor Gideon Hausner at the Eichmann trial. ‘It has its headquarters in Munich with branches all over Germany and Austria as well as in South American countries. The German community at Hohenau in Paraguay is dominated by ODESSA.’ 

‘ODESSA was organized as a thorough, efficient network,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Every forty miles was a shelter manned by a minimum of three and maximum of five people. They knew only the two surrounding shelters: the one from which the fugitives came to them and the one to which they were to be delivered safely.’ Ironically, some of the inns and farmhouses along ODESSA’S ‘rat line’, as the escape routes became known, were also used by Jewish refugees making their way illegally to what was still Palestine under an expiring British mandate which sought to maintain the population balance between Arabs and Jews. For some Displaced Persons, it was harder to leave Germany and Austria than it was for their former captors. Wiesenthal says: ‘I know of a small inn near Merano, in the Italian Tyrol, and another place near the Resch Pass between Austria and Italy, where illegal Nazi transports and illegal Jewish transports sometimes spent the night without knowing of each other’s presence. The Jews were hidden on the upper floor and told not to move. The Nazis, on the ground floor, were warned to stay inside.’" 

"There was also substantial two-way commuter traffic of wanted Nazis across the border between Austria and Germany. Wiesenthal says that ODESSA used German drivers, hired in Munich under their own names or aliases, to deliver Stars and Stripes, the US Army’s daily newspaper printed in Germany, to the troops in Austria. Military Police would wave these US army vans through the border crossing on the Munich-Salzburg Autobahn and sometimes the drivers would repay the favour by handing them a few free copies while a Nazi fugitive crouched behind bundles of Stars and Stripes.

The recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, which asked no questions and into which scores of low-ranking SS men fled in the last days of the war, also served ODESSA well. In early 1948, Roschmann, the Graz-born ‘Butcher of Riga’, escaped from Austria into Italy with five other Nazi fugitives in a car with French licence plates and a Foreign Legion chauffeur outfitted with papers enabling the car to cross borders without being searched. " 

"Simon Wiesenthal estimates the value of the wealth that the Nazis smuggled out of Europe at close to a billion dollars. ‘After the war,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘the Nazis sent experts and money to Argentina. Perón himself, according to an investigation made in Buenos Aires after his downfall, was given around $100 million. Buenos Aires became the south terminal port for ODESSA. The Germans took over hotels and boarding houses, gave new SS immigrants jobs and identity papers, and had excellent connections with the highest government officials. At one time, a group of Argentinian Germans plotted to fly to Germany and set free all the Nazi criminals in Landsberg Prison.’"

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However, Steinacher too admits, and it is amply clear anyway, that hundreds, no, thousands, of nazi criminals did not escape without plenty of help, and not just from personal contacts outside the nazi and SS, nor in spontaneous rather than an organised way, and moreover this book is all about describing the routes and the people and more who provided this help, not without systematic organisation - albeit not with a properly registered organisation named ODESSA! But then this much is clear to anyone and is what was the more pertinent of the facts - whether there was a specific ODESSA or whether it was all a bunch of big and small organisations attached to saving nazis from prosecution for war crimes, is a really minor point.

Actually, if he were correct in his assertion which is unlikely to say the least, but if it were the case then in absense of a single organisation and in light of facts being as Steinbacher describes, it is rather a far murkier view, with guilt spread across not only nazis fleeing and helping others to escape, or smugglers doing it for money or nazi sympathisers across board, but also various institutions that one normally doesn't or at least most people don't credit with such actions.

Shockingly or not, depending on how naive or aware one is, such help was provided by the Vatican and the International Red Cross. The former is less surprising all in all, but the latter contributes to the discredit the institution has brought on to itself and explains why it is somewhat in oblivion, albeit without explicit and noisy condemnation.

Other than this the book is about describing general and specific data, about the dates and the escape routes and those that escaped and those that helped, and is not as well edited as one would like - much repetition for one, disorganised writing for another.

Also, unless one is specifically into research about all the small and big cases of those who lived happily forever safe in either Argentina or southern Tyrol just across the border from Austria and not far from their homelands in central or eastern Europe, it gets repetitious soon enough. Whether it is intention of the author to make it look like all routine that happened half a century ago or longer, and nothing much can be done about it now since most criminals are safely finished with their lives lived quite well and long, is unclear, but if one has met Germans who attempt to make one think it is rather bad form to go on about it, since the crime was over and the criminals quite old and not likely to hurt anyone now, one gets a tad suspicious such a thought might have lurked in general surroundings of the author, if not deliberately implanted as a subliminal suggestion made stronger with the tedium of going through this to know just who and how many did so escape.

Funnily enough he does admit to various small but definite organisations who could be bunched under the general label ODESSA, after going on about how it did not exist! Some were or at least one was in fact so labelled by the investigative agencies.

Perhaps after a first few very tedious, repetitious, hard to read, badly written chapters, there might be something that makes it worth going through; but one can't but help think though, that it would have benefited immensely with a good editor pruning it ruthlessly, and cleaning up the phrases where sentences and more make very little sense due to confusion of "but" with "and" and more, so the whole work seems like a conspiracy to exhaust the reader into going "ok, enough already, have it your own way" or something like that.

But a painstaking reading plodding through the headache of all that rewards one  with at the very least about how various agencies related to Vatican, Red Cross and generally nazi friendly, anti semitic states either lied outright or made it sound like a virtue to protect or let go of war criminals, citing amongst other things, impartial treatment of refugees, equality, and so forth. Also, of course, the strange fact of south American states being more accepting of Red Cross identity papers which basically allowed forgery, false names, false pictures and more, at more than one stage, while rejecting the papers provided by IRO, the international agency which did in fact check up about whether someone was giving a false name and was in fact a war criminal.

One of the positive points about reading through is about quite how much Vatican and its associates helped, shielded and argued for sanctuary for nazis, including war criminals, giving various almost believable excuses including blaming Jewish organisations for pointing out such escape routes provided for war criminals and mass murderers, with a reasoning about such political vengeance against criminals is what brings antisemitism about, hence blaming Jews for the hatred against them and massacres including Holocaust. This part is introduced early but is more extensive post first quarter or so of the work.
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Another revelation for those not quite in the know, is the role played by various US men then in authority in Europe, in helping this escape route, chiefly Allen Dulles, and others in the chain. This, in view of other little facts now allowed to escape, is revealing. And this, while

"The Allies were increasingly concerned. Fugitives included prominent perpetrators such as the SS officers Erich Priebke, Walter Rauff, and Willem (Wilhelm) Maria Sassen, as well as the commandant of the Riga Ghetto, Eduard Roschmann."

And yet the escapes were routine.

"The most important escape routes that have so far come to light, including the ones that smuggled National Socialists, were led by church groups. Understanding why and how some proponents of the Catholic Church were involved in Nazi smuggling facilitates a better understanding of the post-war alliances between former Nazis and Western intelligence services. One of the church organizations in particular is worth closer examination: the Catholic group Intermarium. Monsignor Krunoslav Draganović, who took care of the escape routes of Croatian fascists amongst other things, was the most senior Croatian representative in the self-appointed management committee of Intermarium. The organization was, according to American historian Christopher Simpson, hugely involved in Nazi border-crossing. Later Intermarium became an important source for the recruitment of exiled Eastern Europeans for the anti-communist propaganda machine or exile organizations sponsored by the CIA. Leading members of Intermarium ended up in CIA-sponsored media such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN).

"The leadership of the Catholic Church saw the Second World War as an intermezzo in a bigger struggle against ‘atheist Communism’. In this dispute, the Vatican allied itself with a series of Christian conservative and clerical-fascist political movements in Europe. The Vatican saw the National Socialists as the lesser evil. Even before the Second World War, the German counter-intelligence departments used members of Intermarium, who were seen as very effective and valuable because of their contacts. By the time the Wehrmacht overran half of Europe, Intermarium was already an ‘instrument of the German intelligence’, as one US Army report noted.88 With the collapse of the Third Reich in 1944/5, senior Catholic clerics organized humanitarian relief programmes for refugees from Eastern Europe. The members of these organizations barely differentiated between Catholics who were persecuted by the Soviets, deportees, and Nazis. The mass of refugees certainly had nothing to do with Nazi crimes; they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Wehrmacht or the Red Army laid waste their villages. At the same time, however, these channels became the most important escape route for SS members, collaborators, and war criminals. Within the Catholic Church were factions that had long sympathized with the Nazis and their fanatical opposition to communism and that wanted to forge an alliance with them. These groups organized programmes to bring tens of thousands of SS men and collaborators from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European states to safety."

Of course, that the virulent and false propaganda by church that had, has, gone on ever since church made peace with Rome, and switched sides from the persecuted and oppressed Jews to precisely the persecuting agency and oppressors - namely, the then Roman empire - was at the root of the antisemitism of Europe that went beyond mere racism, and produced nazi version of antisemitism that - with typical German efficiency and technology - sought to execute a "final solution" by simply massacring all the Jews, made it all the easier for church to maintain this covert sympathy with nazi escapees, and maintaining silence about knowledge thereof wasn't that far from the code of secrecy of confessional that church strives to hold up in face of law everywhere, defending heinous crminals thereby, even absolving them merely for having confessed and claiming repentence.

"The rescue of an entire division of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS—some 11,000 men and women—was perhaps the most dramatic action of Intermarium. In the Rimini internment camp, these Ukranians faced an uncertain future. Most were members of the Galicia grenadier division, which had been formed in 1943. Some members of this division were veterans of Ukrainian police and militia units who had collaborated with the Germans and taken part in anti-Semitic and anticommunist pogroms in their homeland. Some of these men may have even served as guards in concentration camps. Most of these men (with their families) were, however, private soldiers who had committed no war crimes and only found themselves in this compromising situation as a result of circumstances. These Catholic Ukrainians hoped for an independent, anticommunist Ukrainian state after the final victory of the Third Reich.90 The Ukrainian Waffen-SS soldiers finally surrendered to the Western Allies in May 1945.

"During the soldiers’ interment in Rimini, Ukrainian Archbishop Ivan Buchko now came to their aid. Along with other Ukrainian clerics—and with the blessing of the Pope—Buchko took a leading role in Intermarium. He petitioned the Pope in person for the ‘blossom of the Ukrainian nation’—meaning the Waffen-SS men in Rimini. The result was that the collaborators were ultimately not handed over to Stalin, but allowed to emigrate as ‘free colonists’ to Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and other Commonwealth states.92 Thus, thanks to the papal initiative, they escaped safely abroad."

As any reader of the now finally published memoirs of holocaust survivors would know, Ukrainian antisemitism was every bit as vicious and brutal as German, which helped the then German occupation army of the region.

"According to Simon Wiesenthal, Rauff and Hudal organized what was known as the ‘route via Rome’ for escaping senior Nazis. Even in the prisoner-of-war camps, the comrades were told who they could approach in Rome and elsewhere. The political background that made it easier to disguise this enterprise was the seizure of power by communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In all the former Nazi satellite states—Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia—mass arrests were carried out by the new rulers, with former fascists their first targets. As these were all ‘good Catholics’, the Vatican set up relief agencies for this category of refugees. Rauff made contact with these institutions via Bishop Hudal to ensure that his colleagues were not forgotten. Rauff’s comrades included Eugen Dollmann, Hitler’s interpreter in Italy and a confidant of Himmler."

Another Gestapo service was falsifying death.

"As the former SS chief in Milan, Rauff was very well acquainted with Italy because even before the end of the war he had taken numerous precautions and established connections with the Church. Networks like the ones Rauff set up with the assistance of the Church helped serious criminals such as Franz Stangl, the ex-commandant of Treblinka; Josef Schwammberger, who was responsible for thousands of murders in the Przemysl Ghetto; and Adolf Eichmann, who escaped from US imprisonment under the identity SS-Untersturmführer Otto Eckmann in 1945 and arrived in Argentina in 1950 as the South Tyrolean ‘Richard Klement’.130 Fascist solidarity helped people like them to acquire new identities. The last official acts by Gestapo agencies were sometimes to declare the death of colleagues in order to assist their escape. In this way, for example, Gestapo inspector Gustav Jürges became the victim of a bombing raid and fled via Italy to South America as ‘Federico Pahl’."

But

"‘In their favor, it can be argued that, at least after 1949, the Western Allies, as a matter of policy, suspended all war crime prosecutions and consciously allowed former Nazi officials, SS officers, judges, and others to assume senior posts in West German government and industry.’"

And organised it was.

"After their successful escape from Rimini prisoner-of-war camp, SS men were to report to Karl Hass, alias ‘Franco’, in Rome. There he would help them escape to South America, on the instructions of Bishop Hudal. Meanwhile the PCA procured Red Cross travel documents for their travel overseas."

"One curious concluding detail: in the well-known 1969 film The Damned (La caduta degli dei) by Luchino Visconti, the supposedly dead Hass had a part as an extra, playing himself—a Nazi officer. While the war criminal was on the Italian authorities’ wanted list, he was flickering on cinema screens across the length and breadth of Italy. This almost unbelievable detail also reflects the atmosphere in Italy during the Cold War. In 1953, when the CIC shelved its collaboration with Hass, the trained spy had to find another employer because he had also been stonewalled by the Gehlen Organization; most Wehrmacht spies were unwilling to work with former SS men. Hass was then taken on by Italian information services."
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About Argentina as destination for escaping nazis to migrate to:-

"After 1945, Argentina became the most popular refuge for Nazi criminals. Like other countries, Argentina was interested in German scientists and specialists after the collapse of the Third Reich. President Perón wanted to modernize Argentina, particularly its army, but Argentina faced recruitment problems. Unlike the occupying powers, the Argentinians were unable to engage overtly specialists from Germany and Austria, so a plan to exploit the chaotic refugee situation in Europe suggested itself. Because many emigrants wanted to leave Europe via Italian ports, the Argentinians concentrated their efforts on Italy. The Argentinian consular representatives in Genoa and Rome were given the task of recruitment, and special cosmmissions were sent to Italy. Recruiters spoke to the refugees in Italy or smuggled them over the border into the country. Between 1946 and 1955 Argentina and other nations were very busy in northern Italy in what became in some ways ‘Germany’s backyard’.

"The Argentinians concentrated on recruiting mostly the middle level of scientists and military officers, leaving the top people to the Soviets, the British, and the Americans. For practical work related to recruitment, Perón’s diplomats liked to use Argentinians of German origin. Working together with SS men and Italian people-smugglers, they organized an effective system of official, and also illegal, recruitment in Italy. The SS men had the appropriate contacts and often pursued agendas of their own; they were less concerned with recruiting specialists for Perón and more with helping old comrades over the border—including war criminals and SS officers with seriously tainted pasts. For Perón, importing war criminals was not an official policy, but a tolerated fact.

"The particular attractiveness of Argentina for German specialists and emigrants did not emerge overnight. Even during the war Argentina was known for its Germanophile attitude, and it was only after massive pressure from the United States that Argentina declared war on the German Reich in March 1945, making Argentina the last country to enter the war against Nazi Germany. The existence of large German and Italian communities in Argentina meant that there were many links between Argentina and the Axis powers. Simon Wiesenthal consistently saw Argentina as the most important country of refuge for the ‘pro-Nazi world community’, and the Argentinian journalist Uki Goñi has described the role that Argentina (and above all its president, Juan Domingo Perón) played in escape assistance as ‘the real ODESSA’. Most Nazis, however, did not flee overseas, but stayed in Germany and Austria. The often one-sided focus on Argentina as a Nazi refuge has been predominant for decades and has meant that the immigration of German-speakers and the recruitment of specialists by other states after 1945 have been largely overlooked. As discussed previously, apart from Syria, Egypt, Canada, and Spain, the United States itself was also a popular destination for Nazi perpetrators and tainted scientists. But the sheer amount of research that has been done on Argentina makes it a very good case study for the way the system of recycling SS men and war criminals worked."

Argentina was a popular destination for economic migrants from Europe in 19th century, the author informs, particularly southern Europe.

"Between the end of the First World War and the end of the 1920s, many economic migrants arrived in search of a new start. The proportion of Italians in Argentina was particularly high. By the late 1930s two million Italian nationals were living there, forming about one-sixth of the entire Argentinian population. Including those of Italian descent, around 40 per cent of Argentinians had Italian roots.2 But Argentina was also a very popular destination for German and Austrian emigration between the wars, and around 240,000 people of German descent lived in the country. About 45,000 German speakers settled in the capital, Buenos Aires. Around three-quarters of the immigrants were so-called ‘ethnic Germans’, German-speakers from the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. They included many Volga Germans who settled in the interior.

"After Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, a new group of German-speaking immigrants—around 30,000 to 40,000 German refugees fleeing for political or ‘racial’ reasons, most of them Jews—arrived in Argentina.4 In the years after the Anschluss in 1938, an estimated 2,000 Austrian Jews found refuge from Nazi persecution—more than in any other Latin American country.5 This resulted in the first major split in Argentina’s German-speaking community. The official ‘German colony’ adopted the political line of the new rulers in the German Reich.6 The anti-Nazi newcomers remained distant from the German community that aligned itself politically with Hitler’s Reich. But Argentina, or more specifically Greater Buenos Aires, was big enough, with its 13 million inhabitants, for them to stay out of each other’s way. Cultural associations developed that were divided into the ‘Jewish, emigrant’ and the former ‘Reich-German, pro-Nazi’ camps, and no exchanges or common points of contact existed between the two groups.7 From 1933 at least two German-speaking communities in Argentina, the pro- and anti-Hitler groups, existed, in addition to the Jewish community which had its own specific agenda. Thus the country can be understood to have had ‘two or more German-speaking communities’.

"Given its sizeable European population, Argentina was an attractive destination for Nazis after the Axis powers’ defeat. In Europe during the first months after the end of the war in 1945, Germans and Austrians found it nearly impossible to emigrate overseas. Only from 1946 onwards did a large wave of emigration begin again. According to official sources, between 1946 and 1955 66,327 people born in Germany migrated into Argentina. Of these, 51,398 Germans left the Perón republic after a few years. There were 14,929 settlers from Germany who spent a longer time in Argentina.9 For the number of Austrian immigrants, the figures are apparently equally precise. Between 1947 and 1955 the Argentinian immigration authorities recorded 13,895 immigrants born in Austria; 9,710 of them later left Argentina again, which leaves 4,185 people who stayed in the country.10 But the statistics don’t tell the whole story. Ethnic Germans, from Eastern Europe for example, were registered according to their country of birth. Complete statistical data for German-speaking immigration to Argentina is, thus, difficult to determine precisely.11

"Contemporary attempts to estimate more accurately the number of immigrants to Argentina still fall short for a few reasons. According to Holger Meding, some 300 to 800 senior Nazi officials had immigrated to Argentina, including fifty war criminals and mass murderers among them,12 while historian Volker Koop estimated in 2009 that 600 Nazis and military experts from Germany and Austria immigrated to Argentina alone. The Argentinian commission of historians, Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Actividades del Nacionalsocialismo en la Argentina (CEANA), has listed 180 biographies of prominent National Socialists, Nazi perpetrators, fascists, and war criminals from Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, and Yugoslavia who fled to Argentina, sixty-five of them described in brief biographies.14 But this list is only provisional and incomplete. CEANA recorded only the best-known cases, yet thousands of less-prominent Fascists, SS men, and Nazi collaborators from all over Europe resettled in Argentina, too. It is, therefore, also a matter of definition that affects which group to include in the statistics and which not. One major reason why arriving at precise figures is difficult stems from the fact that the fugitives often entered the country with false identities or nationalities. Their given names, places of origin, and nationalities were, in many cases, false. Politics provided another reason why numbers of immigrants with tainted pasts tended to be underestimated after 1945. Established conservative representatives of the German-Argentinian community played down the extent of Nazi immigration. The German Club in Buenos Aires, for example, claims in its History of the Germans in Argentina, that from the end of the war until 1950 there was hardly any immigration from Germany, an attempt to deflect unwanted attention, perhaps.15 No matter what the true count of immigrants after the war may be, Argentina was clearly a much sought-after destination, and the Perón government’s policies ensured that this was the case."

And the policies were far from unclear about who Argentina welcomed.

"Although many of his instructions and pronouncements were distinctly obscure, he was nevertheless very clear on certain points: where possible, immigrants were to belong to the ‘white race’, come from Europe, have a good education, be Catholic, and ideally speak a romance language as their mother tongue. Asians and black Africans were excluded by Peralta’s racial guidelines because they would not meet the criterion of being ‘easily able to assimilate’. Since the population in Argentina was mostly of Spanish, Italian, and German origin, the new arrivals would preferably belong to one of these groups."

Of course, this wasn't straight, since obviously the world couldn't be hunky-dory about war criminals prospering openly.

"Perón’s positive experiences with German senior executives and his government’s recruitment of former Nazis and fellow travellers brought him into conflict with the victorious powers.33 Argentina’s global obligations forbade the intake of people from the former Axis powers without the permission of the Allies. Scientists from the war industry were ostracized, and war criminals had to be extradited. Under pressure from the United States, the countries of the South American continent, including Argentina, were obliged by the 1945 Act of Chapultepec to take common action against the Axis powers. This included freezing their bank accounts and hunting out members of enemy states who had gone into hiding in South America.34 Immigration from the defeated Third Reich was to be closely monitored, but neither Argentina nor the United States adhered to these policies. Nevertheless, the United States strongly criticized Argentina’s lax attitude.35

"In the summer of 1945, the United States had discussed the supposedly ‘critical situation’ in Argentina with other North and South American countries and published its severe accusations against Argentina in a ‘Blue Book’. The main working points in it were German military aid to Argentina, German espionage activities, and Nazi companies and business interests in Argentina.36 Furthermore, the Argentinians had supposedly delayed the extradition of Nazi agents and German embassy staff."

USSR too had taken some of the German scientists and engineers et al, for the same reasons, but they were forced to accept it, unlike those migrating to Argentina. Besides,

"Like Argentina, the United States was also involved in recruiting top German experts. The Americans had a whole arsenal of recruitment possibilities at their disposal. They made scientifically and financially attractive offers or threatened employment bans and worse. Under the code name ‘Operation Paperclip’, the US Army set about reeling in German specialists on a grand scale. The recruitment of a team of German rocket technologists around the designer of the V2, Wernher von Braun, was probably the most striking US achievement in the competition for top German personnel.46 Rather than ending up in the dock, hundreds of Nazi scientists launched new careers in the United States in this way. The facts that von Braun, the head of the Peenemünde rocket research institute, was an SS officer and that thousands of forced labourers and concentration camp inmates had died miserable deaths working in the underground armaments centre of Mittelbau-Dora were simply ignored by the US military."

And while

"By all accounts, the Nazis in Argentina remained loyal to their politics, meeting for coffee in the mornings and clinking glasses in the evening to toast the ‘good old days.’"

The author explains why this migration did not get Argentina take off as a major power - it lacked a vision and a long term program, a commitment, to scientific research and development that was needed, not just a few hundred men or even a few thousand, emigrated nazis. And most of the experts, lacking such programs, didn't stay on in Argentina.
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The details about individual nazis go on through the work, and a normal reader might lose count - are there over a hundred already? - while one reads about yet another Nazi, details of his birth place and time, education and career, some mention of his war criminal record explaining his need to escape, and the usual route via Bolzano to Argentina and other contiguous countries across southern Atlantic. One thing the author repeatedly attempts to emphasize is that there were no formal organisations of former nazis as such helping them to escape, but informal networks and of course the church. It doesn't seem to occur to him that such assertions by him are about as silly and futile as someone attempting to assert that strings don't exist and universe really is up only three dimensional.

"The Austrian authorities often knew of the escape and whereabouts of war criminals and Nazi perpetrators: ‘It has been known to the court for a long time that those chiefly responsible for the serious outrages of 9 November 1938, above all the former SS General [Johann] Feil, escaped responsibility by fleeing to South America.’160 Nevertheless, the efforts of the legal system were often rather modest. The escape of Nazi war criminals was a way for the legal system to avoid the responsibility of prosecution. In order to evade justice, the war criminals didn’t need to escape to South America, just jump across the Brenner."

But one name does come up in almost every case of escape, that of Bishop Hudal. And, too, he mentions names of organisations himself, albeit none formally named ODESSA.

"The Tyrolean was supposedly one of the founders of the Kameradenwerk, the relief organization for Nazi prisoners and their families run by Rudel."

"In many respects, the fleeing Tyrolean National Socialists were pioneers in escaping to Italy. They smoothed the way for comrades from other Austrian and German regions."
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"Franz Stangl was one of the most prominent camp commandants who fled to South America to find a new home. The first time Simon Wiesenthal came across his name was on a list of awards to senior SS officers. Added to it in pencil were the words ‘secret Reich matter—for psychological stress’. Translated from Nazi terminology that means the commandant of Treblinka extermination camp received an award for special merits in the execution of mass murder. Wiesenthal doubts whether this caused Stangl particular mental stress. When Stangl was finally brought in front of a court, he explained to the judge what it was that had really caused him headaches, which Wiesenthal repeats: ‘Some days he had been sent as many as 18,000 people at a time for extermination, yet it had been his duty to return all the railway wagons empty. He simply had no choice but to kill the people, there just wasn’t the room to accommodate them.’165 Stangl was later sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 900,000 people. How many people really died under his control as extermination camp commandant—first in Sobibór and later in Treblinka—will probably never be known.166 As German historian Wolfgang Benz explains, Treblinka extermination camp, ‘given its short existence and its staff—about twenty-five to thirty-five people [. . . was] the most efficient murder apparatus that has ever existed’."

"When the Third Reich deployed all its forces to organize the murder of the Jews, the SS leadership understood that it had ideal experimental laboratories in the euthanasia sanatoriums. In Hartheim and other institutions, methods could be tried out that would later be used on an industrial scale in Treblinka and Auschwitz: the killing of people with poison gas."
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"When the author Frederick Forsyth wrote his semi-fictional novel The Odessa File, he took advice from the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal had very personal reasons for wanting to catch Roschmann: he himself had been a concentration camp inmate, and most of his family were murdered. In 1945, after his liberation from the concentration camp, Wiesenthal began to work for the US Army in the search for war criminals in Austria and was at first employed by US intelligence services, then by the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps. In 1947 he began to establish his Documentation Centre in Linz and later in Vienna.

"Roschmann’s biography was tailor-made for the main character in The Odessa File. Wiesenthal had asked Forsyth to use Roschmann as a character in his book in order to publicize the Roschmann case.205 The film of the novel had its premiere in 1974 and was shown all around the world. Both the book and film were a great success and still shape popular ideas about the escape of the Nazis. In South America, at any rate, the film created considerable unease amongst Roschmann’s former comrades, and Wiesenthal received countless clues about the former Ghetto commandant’s whereabouts. Roschmann was probably given an increasingly wide berth by his comrades because, at Wiesenthal’s suggestion, in the movie Roschmann was responsible for the cowardly murder of a Wehrmacht officer; his comrades could not know if this depiction was fictional or factual.

As a result, they could no longer see Roschmann as an ‘honourable’ comrade, but only as a ‘swinish’ one. At any rate, from the moment ‘his’ film played in South America and ‘his’ book entered the bookshops, he constantly changed his place of residence and never stayed anywhere for longer than a few weeks. The newspaper reports about the film were also about him. Roschmann became the quarry, just as he had been the quarry in the film. In October 1976 the German embassy presented the Argentinian Foreign Ministry with the extradition request in the Roschmann case. Roschmann was warned and immediately fled to Paraguay.206 In August 1977 he died of heart failure in Asunción. Because of the amputation of several toes, mentioned in the SS files, he was unambiguously identified after his death.207 The dead man’s fingerprints were also identical to the ones taken from Roschmann in 1947 the first time he was arrested in Graz, thus ensuring that the deceased was, in fact, the Butcher of Riga.208"
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"The major German companies, such as Siemens, which had established a significant presence in Argentina before the war, re-established its branches there after 1945.211 West German companies and their branch offices in South America generally preferred the attitude of the new German and Austrian immigrants over that of locals, and some of the immigrants reached important positions. Practically the whole top level of Mercedes Benz in Argentina consisted of immigrants from Germany and Austria.

"After a brief transition phase, immigrated businessmen were able to connect with German companies who had developed a strong presence in South America during the pre-war years. Simon Wiesenthal observed bitterly that Siemens, Krupp, and Volkswagen in Argentina had been ‘a hotbed of Nazis’.212 The boards of companies such as Bayer, Höchst, and Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) sometimes worked with old comrades in Europe and overseas. But one should not assume that these were always ideological networks—although these did exist. Practical reasons were more crucial: the new immigrants spoke perfect German and, after a few years, good Spanish; they were technically up to date; they often had good training; and they were industrious, flexible, and highly motivated, as Holger Meding stresses.213 For some German and Italian escape agents, once their smuggling careers ended, emigration to the Río de la Plata was a natural choice, for they had the knowledge and the contacts needed to do so. The comrades who were now safely located in Argentina could show their gratitude for the escape assistance and hospitality they had received in Italy.

"Scientists with SS connections had numerous networks and circles of friends, which made it easier for them to make a fresh start. Over time a reliable network of companies and professional opportunities developed, particularly in Argentina. Because President Perón was very interested in specialists from the former Third Reich, between 1945 and 1950 alone, sixty German scientists emigrated to Argentina where they worked in their professions. This exchange continued the tradition of German researchers coming to work in Argentina. ‘Nevertheless, the post-war migration was not an exchange of scientists in the usual sense, as with guest professorships, because a large number of scientists planned to stay in Argentina on a more than temporary basis’, probably a longer period, or possibly forever, as Gabriele Ley stresses.214

"The German commercial and political penetration in Argentina went so deep that it was disturbed only slightly by Germany’s military defeat. Neither domestic nor foreign anti-Axis forces were able to induce the Argentine Government to take effective action against the principal German business houses which had provided funds and cover for Nazi operations. The men who headed these firms continued to exert great influence on high-ranking officials in the Argentine Government and armed forces. The main German businesses suffered no major interference and the repatriation or extradition of a large number of the Nazi leaders on Allied ‘wanted’ lists was prevented.218"
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"In Egypt, eighty German and Czech experts were working for the Egyptian Ministry of War. The country wanted to arm itself against Israel with the help of German experts. The leader of these experts was Wilhelm von Voss, a former adjutant of Hitler’s."
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"Not only did the former SS in Argentina help one another professionally, but in South Tyrol, other groups of former Nazis set up thriving businesses, sometimes working in conjunction with their friends in South America. Once again, Perón’s escape assistants in Italy played a key role in this. Connections from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Argentina often came together in companies and SS circles in South Tyrol. Thus the borderland developed from an escape hub into a business hub. In South Tyrol, for example, large quantities of agricultural machinery were imported from Germany and sold on the Italian market. Aedes-Land-maschinen in Bolzano and the firm Mengele & Steiner, operating a branch office in Auer and Merano, were involved in such transactions. There were also ideological networks within the South Tyrolean farming community, which was in large part organized into the Chief Agricultural Association (Landwirtschaflicher Hauptverband).235 Some networks of old comrades and their new careers in the agriculture industry were an open secret. Based on information of prominent local anti-Nazis, the British consulate in Bolzano reported to the embassy in Rome in May 1949: ‘The headquarters of the Nazi movement in S. Tyrol is the exhotel Sti[e]gl at Bolzano, now occupied by the “Hauptverband Land-wirtschaftlicher Genossenschaften” (Consorzio delle Co-operative Agricole), a very powerful body, the prominent Nazis inside this body are [. . .] Nicolussi, [. . .]"
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"After the Second World War the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco provided refuge for many former Nazis, and large numbers of National Socialists also fled overseas via Spain. To ease the pain of nostalgia among his SS comrades in Spain, Hafner opened the Cortijo Tiroles inn—(‘Tiroler Hof’, or ‘Tyrolean Courtyard’)—which seated 500. It was not until 2007 that Pablo Hafner became widely known when the documentary film Hafner’s Paradise by the Austrian director Günther Schwaiger caused a furore.244 The former ‘SS-Führer’ Hafner, who lived unmolested in Madrid until his death in 2010, denied the Holocaust: ‘Hitler was not the gasser of the Jews, but the promoter of efforts to establish the Jewish national state (Zionism!). [. . .] Not a single Jew was killed because he was a Jew! For me Hitler is the saviour of Europe and Christianity!’"
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"One other prominent Nazi fugitive was SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Kurt Christmann, but unlike Hafner, he returned to Europe after emigrating to Argentina. Even as a young man, he had been involved in the failed Hitler Putsch in Munich in 1923. As a Gestapo official, he was deployed after the Anschluss of Austria in Vienna, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and Klagenfurt. From the summer of 1942 until the summer of 1943, Christmann was head of Einsatzkommando 10a.252 The official task of the unit, based in Krasnodar in southern Russia, was to ‘combat partisans’. The SS took this as licence to murder everyone who, in their eyes, represented a threat, all those who were considered ‘Slavic Untermenschen’ or Jews. Christmann himself murdered at least 105 people, each ‘as an accessory’.253 While serving in Krasnodar, he once had between forty and sixty predominantly Jewish men, women, and children killed in a gas truck. The victims were horribly suffocated by the exhaust fumes of the truck within ten to fifteen minutes. Christmann claimed only to have been present at the gassings by chance. He added: ‘I think that if several people die together, it’s still more pleasant than each one individually’. For Christmann, at any rate, it was ‘not such a world-shattering event that I could remember it all that precisely.’

"After the end of the war, Christmann went on living in Stuttgart-Feuerbach, supposedly under a false name. In 1946 he was arrested by the Americans as a wanted Nazi perpetrator and interned in Dachau. He managed to escape from there after a short time and worked for the British occupation forces in Germany under his alias ‘Dr Ronda’. In Rome he acquired new papers and travelled, probably on a Red Cross document, to Argentina. Under questioning, Christmann gave only a brief account of his escape: ‘Via Munich I went to Italy, where thanks to the Vatican I got papers and an entry permit for Argentina for my wife and myself.’255 From the autumn of 1948 until February 1956 he lived in South America.256 Christmann was also political in his new homeland. He maintained close contact with the fighter pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and the CIA identified him as one of the masterminds behind the Kameradenwerk neo-Nazi movement.257 After his return to Germany in 1956, he lived as an estate agent in Munich. His denazification trial was suspended as only insufficient charges could be brought against him. An initial indictment in 1971 was immediately abandoned for lack of evidence.258 Christmann was put on trial again only in 1980 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.

"On the whole, the SS perpetrators’ collaboration worked in assisting one another to emigrate and to start new lives in Argentina. On 23 October 1948 the steamer San Giorgio left the port of Genoa with Erich Priebke and his family on board. On 18 July 1948 Josef Mengele travelled to Argentina. On 14 July 1950 Adolf Eichmann alias ‘Richard Klement’ from Tramin landed in Buenos Aires, the portal to a new life. Hans-Ulrich Rudel travelled with his closest comrades in the Luftwaffe to the New World. It would be entirely false to say that these men formed a branch of the fantasy ‘ODESSA’ on the Río de la Plata. But contact between the ‘old comrades’ was maintained even in South America, which continued to feed rumours of a ‘secret organization’.

"Even if the SS community demonstrably maintained their connections and shielded and protected one another, there was never a rigidly organized conspiratorial network. As long as Perón held his protecting hand over the Nazi criminals, such a thing wasn’t necessary. In July 1949 the President even passed a general amnesty for foreigners who had entered Argentina illegally. Questions about the past were hardly asked. A certain ‘Otto Pape’ went to the immigration office and claimed to have found refuge in the German Embassy in Rome until the end of the war. In this way, Otto Pape once more became Erich Priebke—quite legally. He settled in one of the many German emigrant communities that had mutated into a stronghold of fleeing National Socialists; like many of his former comrades, Priebke, too, chose San Carlos de Bariloche, an idyllic ski resort in the Andes, where the former Nazi Reinhard Kops had already settled.

"San Carlos de Bariloche proved to be a comfortable town with its familiar architecture, activities, and cultural ties. In Bariloche there were houses in the Tyrolean style; in the 1930s Austrian ski instructors had developed the area for winter sports, the Residencial Tirol and Edelweiss hotels and the pension Kaltschmidt were inviting places to stay, and the ski lifts were built by the Austrian Doppelmayr firm. The number of German-speaking settlers was large even before 1945, and connections with the old homeland abounded.262 Thus the Innsbruck expert in Tyrolean folklore, Karl Ilg, was not surprised to note in 1976: ‘The German-speaking inhabitants, whose immigration has still not come to an end—around and after the Second World War it was, as I have said, particularly strong!—[are members of associations].’263 Here Priebke led a peaceful existence, opened his delicatessen, and even became the chairman of the German–Argentinian cultural association.264 He travelled often around the world and regularly renewed his passport at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires.

"Priebke’s life continued uneventfully in Bariloche until 1994 when he spoke to an American television crew, which was actually searching for Reinhard Kops, and openly described his participation in a massacre near Rome and his own shooting of two Italians. The former SS-Sturmbannführer Priebke had been involved in a spectacular act of violence—the shooting of 335 hostages in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome on 24 March 1944. Officially this was an act of retaliation for a bombing attack by Italian partisans which cost thirty-three South Tyrolean police soldiers their lives.265 This act of revenge in the Ardeatine Caves is seen to this day by most Italians as the worst symbol of Nazi barbarism in their country. The interview with Priebke caused a national outrage. An Italian call for extradition followed shortly after, and this was granted in November 1995. On 1 August 1996 a Roman military court declared in its verdict that Priebke could no longer be prosecuted for his crimes as they lay outside the statute of limitations. At the higher court, Priebke was sentenced to a limited period of imprisonment. But this sentence, too, came to nothing. In 1998 Erich Priebke and his fellow defendant Karl Hass were each sentenced to ‘lifelong imprisonment’. As of this writing, Priebke lives under house arrest in Rome.266

"In a part of the world in which prominent Nazis and some of the worst murderers of Jews from the Third Reich found a new home, many Germans thought the murder of millions was a malicious Allied—or Jewish—invention. This explains why so many escaped Nazi criminals found support among their compatriots. Simon Wiesenthal called Argentina the ‘Cape of Last Hope’, and in a way, it was: many Nazis saw it as their last refuge, and many long-established German settlers preserved their flattering image of the Third Reich."
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"Simon Wiesenthal’s demand of justice for the victims and judgment for the perpetrators faded away for the most part during the Cold War. It was no coincidence that Wiesenthal had the persona of the lone voice in the wilderness, the outsider, the moral authority that often became a source of discomfort to society and the leading elites, not only in his homeland of Austria, but in many countries around the world. His attitude didn’t fit the zeitgeist of the Cold War. Today his position is enjoying a renaissance, even if—with the war generation fading away—it leads to the discovery and sentencing of wanted Nazi perpetrators less often than it once did. The ‘Vienna Wiesenthal Institute of Holocaust Studies’ has been in development for some years. Even twenty years ago this appreciation of the man who tirelessly reminded his country of the criminal role of certain Austrians during the war would have been difficult to imagine from a political point of view. In Austria the debate around President Kurt Waldheim’s war record in 1986 finally shattered the myth of victimhood once and for all. Over the past few years, the Nazi past has provided fewer headlines than Austria’s consistent record in its treatment of the Holocaust—as, for example, when the controversial British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment by an Austrian court in 2006 for trivializing the Holocaust, a violation of the law prohibiting National Socialist activities (Verbotsgesetz).

"This example shows very clearly the transformation that has occurred in Western democracies’ recent past, starting from the unprecedented prosecutions of the Nuremberg Trials, to silence about the Shoah, to today’s naming of historical injustices and the ‘mastering of an unmasterable past’.1 As the Anglo-American historian Tony Judt has shown, members of Western democracies now approach the World War and the Shoah through examination and research.2 But in the years of reconstruction immediately after the war, things were quite different. The years of the post-war economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) were a time both of double standards and of silence. The examination of the most recent past—and the Holocaust in particular—was still largely ignored. Thus the subject of Nazi flight reveals the difficulty of responding to the past. While this book has described the chief players and the mechanisms and conditions that enabled the flight in detail, the treatment of the subject since 1945 is of central importance and raises several questions: Why did it take so long for Nazi flight to come under scrutiny? What is the significance of this problematic area today? How different is the situation in individual countries that were particularly involved in the flight of Nazis? What is the reaction of the institutions involved in it, particularly the Red Cross and the Vatican? Finally, how are countries and individuals to respond to historical injustice?

"Auschwitz casts a long shadow, and the ghosts of the past catch up with us time and again. Thus Aribert Heim’s photo was seen everywhere in the media in the summer of 2008 when the media reported that Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre would search for him in Chile. Heim, a concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen, had been tirelessly sought by Wiesenthal, unsuccessfully in the end. The Austrian Nazi perpetrator Heim had gone into hiding in 1962 and a warrant was still out for his arrest; for years he was suspected of being in South America. According to the latest newspaper reports, however, ‘Dr Death’ was supposed to have died in his hideaway in Egypt, yet in 2009 documentarians visiting Egypt could find no trace of his body or grave. Similarly, the case of the alleged Sobibór guard Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk is also keeping the courts and the international media busy. Demjanjuk emigrated to the US in 1951 and lived there undisturbed until the 1980s when first Israel, then Germany, prosecuted him. These more recent stories illustrate again the fact that Nazi perpetrators as well as tens of thousands of collaborators managed to flee when Europe lay in ruins.

"The days and weeks immediately after the end of the war were of crucial importance for the Nazi leaders and perpetrators. Shortly before or after the arrival of the Allies, some of them committed suicide. These included not only the internationally notorious representatives of the Nazi dictatorship, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, but also many senior and middle-ranking executives of the Nazi regime, as well as some Gauleiters. In the period immediately after the war, especially high-ranking and prominent Nazi perpetrators were subject to penalties. The first trial against the main war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945–6 was sympathetically received by wide circles of the German and Austrian public, but that soon changed. Another group of SS perpetrators and National Socialists, not the largest by a long way, but a considerable contingent, fled in the years immediately after the war and emigrated overseas as a way of escaping justice.

"For many, the escape routes through Italy were the path to the future, despite the hardships involved and the risk of Allied capture; over time, the Allies’ use of these routes for their own purposes and their shifting focus to the Cold War lessened the risks, however. Around 1947, US officials such as Vincent La Vista described the escape agents and the institutions involved in great detail. But the relevant ‘top secret’ report ended up in the classified sections of the archives, and the underground channels were not suppressed, allowing Nazis, fellow perpetrators, and Jews illegally travelling to Palestine to use the ‘ratlines’ in their bid for a new life. Michael Phayer sums up the findings and effects of the report succinctly:

"‘Not until July 1947 did the U.S. State Department’s Vincent La Vista produce his very important investigation of illegal emigration from Rome, by which time the United States had already made an executive decision to allow anticommunist black fascists to walk away from their World War II crimes. La Vista’s report, a boon for historians, had no effect on history.

"There were good reasons for that. In the US State Department, La Vista’s employer, the actual enemy was increasingly being identified as the Soviet Union. In 1947 the influential American diplomat George Kennan created the motto of ‘containment’. He demanded harsher policies against the Soviet Union, which was to be put under constant pressure so as to hasten its inevitable collapse. Against this background, denazification went into abeyance a few years after the end of the war and so did the search for Nazi perpetrators. Shutting down the ratlines, which were also used by the Americans in their drafting of technical experts and Cold War operatives, would have seemed counterproductive to US intelligence services.

"As the years passed, conditions made it possible for fugitives to escape Europe—and sometimes to return. As a result of the Allies turning a blind eye to the escape routes, perpetrators such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, as well as the great majority of fugitives, were able to get away without great difficulty between 1947 and 1950. Not only did the Allies no longer have any great interest in prosecuting the perpetrators or destroying the escape routes precisely mapped out by La Vista, but the countries of continental Europe quickly realized that establishing an administration and a new start for the state could not be accomplished entirely without the old elites. Soon generous amnesty laws were passed—in Italy as early as 1946 and in Austria in 1948. The West German Amnesty Law of 1949 for fellow-travellers and minor criminals and the social reintegration of 30,000 officials and former professional soldiers in 1951 exonerated the majority of Germans. From the mid-1950s hardly anyone had to fear prosecution by the state and the judiciary over his past. What followed was a quickly spreading amnesia. In the 1950s denazification and judicial reappraisal of the events of the war had been not only suspended, but largely forgotten or repressed.

"The Cold War made it particularly difficult to reappraise the very recent past. The chapter on the Nazi past had supposedly been concluded in the mid-1950s. Even when trials against Nazi perpetrators were held, the sentences were very lenient.5 In particular, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 marks a caesura, as the Cold War immediately escalated into an open conflict there. From 1950 onwards very few war criminals fled Europe; on the contrary, many returned from abroad. For those responsible for the genocide of the Jews, however, a return to Europe was too risky, even after amnesty laws were enacted. The connection between the escape movement and the outbreak of the Cold War is obvious. As the Allied prosecutions abated and the conflict between West and East heated up in 1947–8, emigration reached its peak. But even a few years later, when the conflict in Korea broke out openly and the Cold War turned hot, the movements of emigration and escape came to a standstill in 1950–1.

"The Nazi past and the Shoah were repeatedly addressed from the 1960s onwards, but the Cold War also covered over many old crimes from the Second World War. This no longer holds true for Europe after 1989, in part because of a new generation born after the war that began to question its secrets. Tellingly, the first National Holocaust Memorial Museum outside Israel was not set up until 1992, and it was outside Europe in Washington, DC. Similar memorials have been set up in Europe only over the last few years. Since 2005 there has also been a Holocaust Memorial (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) in the heart of Berlin. Yet these memorials point more to a tentative step at honouring, rather than re-examining, the past.

"The acknowledgement of the Holocaust of the Jews was not only repressed in places where there were good reasons for feeling responsible (as in Austria or Germany), but also in Poland, France, and Italy. Even in Great Britain, the genocide of the Jews was barely mentioned, though that nation has always been proud of its uncompromising role in the struggle against the Third Reich. Tony Judt stresses this global phenomenon: ‘In retrospect it is the universal character of the neglect that is most striking.’6 The Holocaust was only one event among many that people simply wanted to forget but could, in the end, only repress. In the words of Hans-Magnus Enzensberger: ‘In the affluent years after the War […] the Europeans sought refuge in a collective amnesia’.7 Everyone wanted to be a victim, even the Germans. They felt like the victims of a small clique of criminals around Hitler. They also felt like victims of the Allied ‘bombing terror’, the expulsions, the mass rapes by Soviet soldiers, and finally ‘Hitler’s war’. The Federal Republic under Konrad Adenauer acknowledged publicly that terrible crimes had been committed against Jews ‘in the name of the German people’, but for the most part the criminals were not given faces; they remained anonymous and abstract. The most recent past served in East and West as a quarry, so to speak, for selective historical images. In the German Democratic Republic, much more attention was devoted to the antifascist resistance fighters than to the perpetrators, who were in any case located for the most part in ‘capitalist’ West Germany.

"But Nazis on the run were a fact that could not be entirely ignored. Thus spectacular individual cases such as that of Eichmann became an outlet for suppressed feelings. The question of how Nazi criminals could escape prosecution after the war, and in which political context that was to occur, who covered up their escape, and what individual interests lay behind it, faded into the background. Sensational individual cases were a distraction, but at the same time they helped to keep the subject of Nazi flight and Nazi crimes alive. Simon Wiesenthal, the ‘Nazi-hunter’, knew that very clearly. For him, the ODESSA myth was maybe only a vehicle by which he could bring his concerns to a wider public. But myths alone can’t explain the Nazi flight. Only since the 1990s have misrepresentations surrounding secret escape organizations such as ODESSA begun to unravel. From the fog of myths, the outlines of Nazi flight are beginning to emerge.

"Over the last twenty years, historians and journalists have tried to identify the true impulses and determining factors of Nazi flight. Just as Heinz Schneppen convincingly demolished the ODESSA myth,9 Uki Goñi has emphasized how Argentina under Perón’s presidency was a major driving force behind the movement (the title of his book, The Real Odessa, is telling in this regard). Over the past few years, Richard Breitman and other American historians have clearly exposed the involvement of US intelligence services in the context of the ‘ratline’ in books such as US Intelligence and the Nazis. But the wider political context is only slowly coming into view, particularly when examining the relationship between the Cold War against the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the repression of the genocide of the Jews, the Shoah, on the other. Both factors, the political parameters and the silence and repression of a whole generation, were what made the flight of Nazis possible.

"Governments’ silence, but also that of nongovernmental agencies, contributed to the flight of Nazis and the secreting of the past. In the 1961 Eichmann trial, little importance was given either to illegal emigration or the background to it. A great deal of attention was probably devoted to editing out the involvement of major institutions such as the Catholic Church or the ICRC, and this was done almost completely. As an observer of the trial in Jerusalem, the philosopher Hannah Arendt was able to tease out only a few references to the role of such institutions in Eichmann’s flight. The notes that Eichmann took during his time in prison, ‘My Escape: Report from the Cell in Jerusalem’, could not be kept entirely hidden from the international press. But, in the end, such reports disappeared for decades into the CIA archives and were only released a few years ago.10 So it can hardly come as a surprise that efforts were made to sweep this information under the carpet. What was largely edited out during the Jerusalem trial continued by means of deliberate concealment to obscure the truth about Nazi flight. The political implications in particular were ignored. But it is precisely in these connections between realpolitik and morality, legal reappraisal and the interests of the Cold War, that we may find the key to an understanding of why a considerable number of Nazi perpetrators were able to escape justice and responsibility.

"Contradictions between public and private actions have further clouded the history of the post-war treatment of Nazis and other perpetrators. It was the United States that opened up a completely new chapter with regard to guilt and war crimes at the Nuremberg Trial. Traditional victors’ justice was to be replaced by the rule of law and new international legal and moral norms and standards. For the first time, heads of state and military commanders had to take responsibility for ‘crimes against humanity’. The massive, systematic, state-sponsored crimes led to the decision to set up an International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg against some (surviving) major war criminals such as Hermann Göring and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. But even in the ‘selection’ of the defendants, strategic and practical considerations sometimes found themselves in competition with moral and legal claims.11 While SS General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s deputy until 1943, was not prosecuted, but protected by US agencies against any kind of Allied prosecution, other perpetrators faced serious penalties. Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison, which he ended in 1987 by taking his own life at the age of 93. In spite of repeated approaches by the Americans, the Soviets refused to put mercy before justice where the old man was concerned.12 Nuremberg thus also represents the selective treatment of guilt, responsibility, and justice. The 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg brilliantly captures the question of morality, justice, and the interests of the early Cold War. Its cast, which includes such excellent actors as Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, and Maximilian Schell, doubtless contributes to this. The film is set in 1948 and examines the trial of four Nazi judges who were complicit in euthanasia and the persecution of political opponents: not only the Germans, but also the Allies wanted to draw a line under the past, and many people saw the trial and the ‘rummaging around in the past’ as unnecessary. The accused lawyer and Nazi Minister Dr Ernst Janning (played by Burt Lancaster) breaks through this silence and freely admits his moral guilt. But at a time of conflict between the Western and Eastern power-blocks, such positions were the exception.

"Beyond Nuremberg, many examples reveal the uneven ‘justice’ that prevailed in the early Cold War years. After the suicide of his boss, Himmler, Karl Wolff could have been condemned at Nuremberg as a proxy for the SS, but nothing came of it. Because of his contacts with US intelligence services and his usefulness in the ‘fight against Communism’, the Allies decided not to prosecute him. In this respect Italy was an early ‘testing ground’ for future German–American cooperation. As historian Kerstin von Lingen has clearly shown, Wolff’s US counterpart and protector, Allen Dulles, knew of Wolff’s past as a perpetrator, but Dulles thought Wolff useful.13 The Americans’ treatment of Wolff was by no means an exception. Nazi criminals, scientists, officers, and collaborators were brought back into service—recycled for the new struggle against the Soviet power if they could be useful. Many such cases occurred in the intelligence services and the military. This coordinated recruitment of Nazi scientists has been the subject of heated debates in the United States over the past twenty years. One such example is that of Wernher von Braun. As SS-Sturmbannführer and technical director of the Peenemünde Military Research Establishment, he was responsible for the development and production of large rockets during the Second World War. His V-2 missiles terrorized people in British and Dutch cities. After the end of the war, the technician was immediately taken back into service by the Americans and became director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Braun’s past was no great secret, even in the United States. But little was made of the fact that concentration camp inmates in camps such as Mittelbau Dora produced the V-2 rockets in appalling conditions, and thousands died of their slave labour. Braun helped the Americans to be the first on the moon, and that was all that counted. Usefulness rather than morality was at the top of the US agenda.

"Similarly, General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the counter-intelligence division ‘Foreign Armies East’ made a remarkable second career for himself after 1945. Even before the end of the war, Gehlen was aware that the Western powers would probably turn against their former ally, the Soviet Union, sooner or later. When they did so, they would need his knowledge and his colleagues in the fight against communist expansion because the Americans themselves had no agents in Germany and the Soviet states. Gehlen’s calculations were correct. In 1946 the US military appointed him as head of the ‘Gehlen Organization’ spy network, which later became the West German intelligence service. Gehlen remained its head until 1968. He was the beneficiary of Allen Dulles’ position of ‘usefulness before prosecution’; Dulles had consistently fought for this policy and, in the end, became head of the CIA. Dulles and his intelligence agents were soon way ahead of the dilettantes of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) where active espionage was concerned, particularly in terms of experience. SS officers such as Wilhelm Höttl repeatedly offered the Americans at the CIC sound spy networks behind the Iron Curtain, even entire underground armies consisting of former collaborators of the Germans and nationalists who could supposedly be easily reactivated against the Soviets. But in many cases, these ‘underground armies’ operated somewhere between boundless exaggeration and pure wishful thinking, making the CIC less effective than its counterpart, the CIA.

"The story of Klaus Barbie, once a powerful and brutal Gestapo chief in Lyons in occupied France, explains better than any theoretical considerations the logic of the early Cold War. Barbie was one of those responsible for the torture and murder of members of the resistance—Jean Moulin among them—in the South of France. In 1947 he started working for the CIC and was smuggled to South America by US agencies. The Franco-German ‘Nazi hunters’ Beate and Serge Klarsfeld began to track Barbie down in Bolivia in the early 1970s. He was extradited to France and brought before the court there. The trial sparked intense controversies in France concerning the relationship between the occupying Germans and the Vichy regime. The first cracks appeared in France’s attempts to suppress the past. Barbie was by no means the most significant war criminal in France, but Moulin became a martyr of the resistance, and his tormentor thus became a symbol of the Nazi terror in France. This case was significant in that it raised the question of the US’s role in shielding Nazis from prosecution and the reasons behind that policy.

"Since the Barbie case, the problematic role of the United States in Nazi smuggling has become an internationally debated topic. In 1983 the US government even had to give a formal apology for its involvement in helping Barbie to escape—an early example of an apology for historical injustice. US authorities in the early Cold War put the usefulness of former SS men before the prosecution of the perpetrators. Consistent reappraisal and the prosecution of Nazi crimes that went hand in hand with it soon fell victim to reasons of state.

"One example will have to suffice here. In 1950 the Displaced Persons Commission of the US Congress stated: ‘The Baltic Waffen-SS units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities and qualifications from the German SS. Therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States.’ The historian Tony Judt concisely sums up these distortions on the part of the US authorities: ‘The Baltic Waffen-SS had been among the most brutal and enthusiastic when it came to torturing and killing Jews on the Eastern Front; but in the novel circumstances of the Cold War they were of course “our Nazis”.’14 As this example clearly shows, decisions in the context of refugee policy were extremely political, and by no means purely humanitarian.

"It becomes evident through this study that, in the larger context, fighting communism became more important to the West than punishing Nazis and justified a certain collaboration by US intelligence services and their high-tech community with former Nazis. Moral standards were subordinated to pragmatism. Some war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators were thus protected against prosecution by the US information services. The role of the US government and its intelligence services in the flight of the Nazis has been under examination by the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG) since 1999. This commission of historians is concentrating its investigations on the role of the US intelligence services in the recruitment of anti-communist specialists from the periphery of Himmler’s SS. Over the past ten years, the IWG has released some eight million pages of secret service reports, including 1.2 million pages on the SS, 74,000 pages of CIA personal and case files, and over 350,000 pages of FBI documents. Archive sources are the precondition for a solid reappraisal of this subject. The IWG’s results are shocking, but also show that a democratic society is entirely capable of ‘coming to terms with the past’.

"The United States was not the only country that aided Nazis when it was in its interests to do so; Italy did the same thing and, like the United States, tried to keep it quiet. One telling—if rather drastic—Italian example of secreting the past was the ‘cupboard of shame’. This was an old filing cabinet in the Palazzo Cesi, the headquarters of the Procura Generale Militare in Rome. Here, from the 1950s until the early 1960s, files in part deposited by the Allies concerning Nazi war crimes in Italy (committed by the SS, the Wehrmacht, and Italian fascists) were kept, even though they should have been sent to the responsible military state prosecutors. As Italy wanted to take its NATO partner Germany into account for reasons of state, the documents lay undisturbed, gathering dust. It was not until 1994 that a judicial officer in search of documents for the trial against former SS officer Erich Priebke opened the cupboard. Almost 700 files were revealed, and they were finally sent to the relevant military state prosecutors’ offices. A series of trials and sentences followed, albeit in many cases far too late.

"The story of Karl Hass, Priebke’s closest colleague in Rome, also draws a very clear picture of Italy’s attempts to deal with the past. Hass, who took part in the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome in 1944 and was a war criminal wanted in Italy, stayed in the sunny south after the war and worked for the Italian and US intelligence services. In the 1950s he was seemingly declared dead, but in 1969 he took a minor role in Visconti’s film The Damned, in which he played a Nazi officer. No one was troubled by that fact, and having been declared dead, he remained officially so. The ‘Priebke case’ unleashed a controversy about the recent past that was to last for decades. Now the ‘long shadows of the Holocaust’16 had caught up with Italy as well.

"After the Priebke affair, a belated judicial reappraisal of the recent past occurred in Italy. At the same time, in the 1990s, critical voices about the country’s own fascist past were also growing louder, in competition with the revisionist statements of leading politicians. The special role of Italy as a ‘highway (Reichsautobahn) for war criminals’ has hitherto never been examined in its own right. The question of Italy’s role was mostly only touched upon—as it was in the international media in 2007. In this case it concerned the archives of the Red Cross Tracing Service in Arolsen in Germany. There was repeated resistance to this from the Italian government, and journalists were not the only ones who surmised that the attitude of resistance might have something to do with Italy’s involvement in ‘Nazi-smuggling’. The Italian government delayed the process, supposedly ‘because they fear the records will reveal just how many Nazis escaped through Italy after the war’,18 the Washington Post wrote in March 2007. For Italy, the process of coming to terms with the past seems to be a slow one.

"Despite the stalling of the Italian government, historians’ reappraisal of Nazi war crimes and the fascist past has without a doubt made great progress in Italy since the 1990s. This reappraisal by current historians also applies to the northern Italian border province of South Tyrol. Nevertheless, the image of South Tyrol as a ‘victim’ still prevails there among the wider public. After the First World War, the southern part of the Tyrol was assigned to Italy as spoils of war, even though German was, and remains, the majority language; this fact contributes to a victim mentality. In addition, for seventy years the German-speaking population has referred to the years of cultural oppression by Mussolini’s fascism, which also furthers the victim mentality. The role of many South Tyroleans as perpetrators under National Socialism, however, tends to be overlooked. That has much to do with the ‘ethnic pillarization’ of South Tyrolean society—a division in many areas between Italian- and German-speaking populations.19 The Italians in the region refer to their role as victims during the Nazi occupation of 1943–5, and the German-speakers to their role as victims during the twenty-year rule of Italian fascism. Each group has always seen itself as the victim, the other as the perpetrator. After 1945, ‘fronts of unity’ formed on both sides according to language groups, quite openly serving to achieve political goals. In South Tyrol this stance of national hostility produced a situation not unlike that seen elsewhere in the Cold War, and the reappraisal of the most recent past was made much more difficult.20 Eichmann’s and Mengele’s new identities as South Tyroleans were in no way a coincidence and shed some light on the Nazi past of this border region. But as in Germany and elsewhere, in South Tyrol there were victims and perpetrators as well as victims who were also perpetrators.

"Argentina, like Italy, was forced to confront its past with Priebke’s extradition from Argentina to Italy in 1995. For the first time Argentina, too, officially requested clarification concerning his Nazi past. In 1997 the Argentinian government set up a special Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Actividades Nacionalsocialistas en la Argentina, CEANA). CEANA—whose panel included famous personalities from public life (Edgar Bronfman, President of the Jewish World Congress; Sir Ralph Dahrendorf, former Rector of the London School of Economics; and Richard Joseph Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor at the Yugoslavian Criminals Tribunal in The Hague) and whose staff included renowned historians—was set up to cast a penetrating light on Argentina’s relationship with National Socialism. But CEANA’s work was repeatedly accompanied by controversies. Ignacio Klich, the head of CEANA, criticized the book by Argentine journalist Uki Goñi about Nazi flight to Argentina. The Real Odessa, he claimed, was ‘unfair’ for not showing that Argentina had taken in thousands of Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945. But that was only half the truth—because Argentina had repeatedly prevented Jewish immigration.

"The debate touched off by Goñi’s reexamination of Argentina’s past policy regarding Jewish immigration yielded startling results. From 1938 Argentina officially closed its borders to Jewish emigrants from Europe who were fleeing from National Socialism. In his book, Goñi had brought the relevant anti-Jewish decrees to international attention. After lengthy discussions, a remarkable moment in the recent history of Argentina took place: on 8 June 2005, in the presence of State President Néstor Kirchner, the secret decree of 1938, designed to prevent the immigration of Jewish refugees, was declared invalid. The revocation of this order represented a high point in the discussion of Argentina’s past in which the country’s relations with the Third Reich were reexamined. Argentina’s immigration policy is often given as a prime example of the reception of Nazi refugees and collaborators, but a similar practice could also be seen in other countries in the Middle East and South America. Even America and Canada allowed Lithuanian and Ukrainian collaborators into their countries from 1946 onwards. The one-sided image of Argentina as the only Nazi refuge came into being in the years around 1945. Argentina’s pro-German sympathies and her late declaration of war on Nazi Germany provoked US diplomats. The result was a demonization of the South American state by the media, an unfair portrayal that is now beginning to be revised.

"The US, Italian, and Argentinian governments are not the only institutions that must answer for their role in the protection of Nazis; the Vatican, too, still faces questions about its activities. In the 1948 Italian election, the United States went to great expense to prevent a possible communist election victory. Anticommunist forces and parties were supported, and the intelligence services were also well prepared. In addition, fresh collaboration between US agencies and the Catholic Church arose. The idea of a communist Italy was a bugbear for the Vatican and the United States; thus Italy was one of the first battlegrounds of the Cold War. In the battle against communism, the Catholic Church immediately found strong allies, not least among them the United States. The priest Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović is an example that demonstrates collaboration between US intelligence services and the Catholic Church in Italy. Draganović was not a lone exception, and neither was he just anybody: as a representative of the Croatian refugee aid mission, he was involved with the agencies of the Vatican. The question of the Vatican’s role in the escape of Nazis and other collaborators is thus posed with particular urgency.

"Additionally, the attitude of the Pope and the Catholic Church towards National Socialism has been controversial for decades. Since Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963), Pope Pius XII has been the focus of criticism for his silence about the Holocaust. The Vatican responded to Hochhuth’s accusations by setting up an internal commission of historians consisting of four Jesuit priests. Commissioned by Paul VI, the churchmen produced between 1965 and 1981 several volumes about the Vatican and its policy in the Second World War; the priests alone had exclusive access to the Vatican archives during this period.21 The commission exonerated the Pope and the Vatican of all moral guilt. Nevertheless, the topic of Pius XII and National Socialism has repeatedly stirred great interest among the public. In November 2008 an exhibition on ‘Pius XII—The Man and His Pontificate’ opened in Rome. It stressed his criticism of the Nazis and the Church’s aid for the Jews. Pope Benedict XVI has also refused to criticize Pius XII, but has at the same time delayed the planned canonization of his controversial predecessor.

"Church agencies did play a central part in helping National Socialists escape—particularly the PCA in Rome. This mission soon became a popular stopping-off point for serious war criminals from Central and Eastern Europe. Contemporary history still only touches on the subject of escape assistance by the Church, which is hardly surprising because access to the Vatican archive for the years after 1939 is still strictly limited. The Vatican’s assistance to escaping Nazis also did not play a major role in discussions about the canonization of Pius XII.22 Yet the history of the Vatican mission for refugees is key to understanding the Vatican’s attitude towards National Socialism, denazification, and the early Cold War. Following the publication of the La Vista report, in February 1992 the Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls made a statement about the accusations that the refugee mission of the Holy See had acquired passports for Nazi war criminals that allowed them to escape. ‘On the contrary, Pius XII and the Vatican helped to save the lives of thousands of Jews,’ said Navarro-Valls, here coming to the defence of the PCA: ‘In those days it was so easy to assume a fake identity and disappear among the refugees, but to represent the work of the Papal Aid Mission as supporting the escape of war criminals is historically false.’ The Pope also gave a statement on the subject. In an interview, he followed up on the comments of his press spokesman Navarro-Valls and said that similar accusations had already been examined and rebutted in the past by the relevant agencies.

"Despite the words of such prominent defenders, the papal aid mission was, in fact, massively involved in helping war criminals and Nazis to escape. A difficult question that remains to be answered is why Catholic dignitaries helped Nazis in their escape. My research shows that their motives were both political and religious. On one hand, high-up members of the Catholic Church aimed to weaken communism as much as possible, and on the other, they hoped to revive religion in Europe at any cost. Radical nationalism and anti-Judaism also played a role, especially in the cases like those of Bishop Hudal and Monsignor Draganović. But ‘the Vatican’ was not a ‘monolithic bloc’, and different positions, ‘different voices’ inside the Catholic Church, could be heard.24 Decisions at the highest level were made on the basis of sober strategic considerations. During the Second World War Pius XII worked to preserve the interests of the Church. It was a balancing act between the dictatorships of Stalin and that of Hitler, and the Pope was prepared for compromises. Although Pius XII’s portrayal as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ is unfair, Pius did see ‘godless’ communism as the main enemy of the Church.

"Religious renewal was also a clearly formulated and important aim in this context. Catholic priests’ understanding of guilt and responsibility was dominated by forgiveness. ‘We do not believe in the eye for an eye of the Jews,’ as Hudal put it. This attitude of Hudal’s was shared by other important people inside the Church. Pius XII and the Catholic Bishops repeatedly asked for mercy and even amnesty for war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators. They believed that the responsibility for the crimes lay only with a handful of leaders, foremost among them were Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. All others, including SS men, were not responsible, and were, perhaps, victims too. Priests and bishops helping war criminals and Nazis helped foremost Catholics. The lost sheep had to be brought back to the fold, they thought. The Catholic Church celebrated its moral victory over National Socialism. Former Nazi officials but also millions of simple Nazi party members were being freed from the ‘false teachings of Nazism’ and were welcomed back into the church. Better yet, non-Catholic Nazi criminals converted to Catholicism. In some cases, ‘re-baptism’ was the pre-condition for Catholic aid. For instance, former Protestant and war criminal Erich Priebke underwent ‘denazification through re-baptism’, as I call it, before he was ‘shipped’ through Italy to Argentina. Holocaust perpetrator Oswald Pohl’s conversion from Protestant Christian before the war to Nazi Gottgläubiger during the Hitler years, to Catholic was compared to St Augustine’s conversion.

"The involvement of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Nazi escape assistance is a similarly complex story. Individual ICRC delegations more or less actively helped war criminals to escape by issuing them with ICRC travel documents, whether out of sympathy for individuals, because of their political attitude, or simply because they were overburdened. The ICRC has a certain moral responsibility and bears a share of the blame for aiding the perpetrators of the war. But the ICRC is belatedly beginning to re-examine its role in the escape assistance for Nazis and fellow travellers. It was only a few years ago that the ICRC in Geneva made its archive generally accessible to research. Since then efforts have been made to find clarification in Geneva as well. Cornelio Sommaruga, the president of the ICRC until 1999, spoke of the ‘failure’ of the Red Cross in the context of escape assistance. ICRC spokespeople accused local ICRC delegates in Italy of joint responsibility and even of ‘complicity with fleeing war criminals’.28 Reference was also made to the extraordinary situation in the post-war years: ‘At the time there were thousands of refugees from completely unchecked backgrounds. If really reliable checks had been introduced, help would inevitably not have been given to many genuine refugees.’29 Was one to refuse help to the many genuine refugees because there might have been some criminals hiding among them? This is a tough question. On the other hand, the checks could easily have been improved, particularly towards the end of the 1940s, when the ICRC had already accumulated some experience. But Headquarters in Geneva delayed implementing these. Refugees from all over Europe were not creatures without biographies or histories; they all had a past. In a fair number of cases, this meant a past as a perpetrator or collaborator in Nazi crimes. But as long as people were able to demonstrate an anticommunist background, the ICRC plainly turned a blind eye. Still the ICRC’s role in assisting Nazis, whether willingly or unknowingly, is not the only question about its World War II past that the agency must answer.

"Was realpolitik placed above moral standards in the case of the ICRC’s silence about the Holocaust? For a moral superpower like the ICRC, its behaviour as regards the Shoah represents a serious problem. The ICRC was three times awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its charity work. Such high regard can be easily damaged. The Swiss historian Jean-Claude Favez, in his pioneering work on the ICRC and its attitude towards the Holocaust, has made it clear why the chief response in Geneva was one of silence.30 In the ICRC, leaders prioritized Swiss national interests and subordinated all other concerns to it. Swiss security and economic interests were not to be jeopardized. References were also made in Geneva to the unconditional neutrality of the ICRC and its lack of legal authority. The clear anticommunist attitude within the ICRC probably played a major role in its policies after 1945. For all the justified criticism, however, the help that the ICRC gave to millions of POWs, casualties, and refugees from the Second World War remains undisputed and unforgotten. In the last years, the ICRC also has dealt more openly with its past and has supported academic research on these topics. It is about time, because the ICRC’s involvement in Nazi escape is striking. Given its silence about the Holocaust and its hesitation in rescuing Jews, the ICRC’s involvement in helping Holocaust perpetrators to escape justice is a serious issue of moral guilt and responsibility.

"As the research presented in this book clearly shows, the escape of Nazis and war criminals aided by the Red Cross and the PCA was an open secret at the time. The US intelligence services knew, the US State Department knew, the International Committee of the Red Cross knew, its presidents Max Huber and Paul Ruegger knew, the Swiss government knew, the Italian government knew, Monsignors Carroll and Montini from the Vatican knew. They all knew as early as 1946/47 about the misuse of the Red Cross travel documents and PCA papers. Internal memos of the Red Cross in Geneva clearly show the agency’s awareness that war criminals escaped thanks to its papers. But the agency decided to continue its practices with few changes. The consequences of turning a blind eye—illustrated so shockingly by the case of Adolf Eichmann, who fled Europe with the help of the PCA and the Red Cross in 1950, four years after the massive abuse had become known inside the respective institutions—is still stunning to contemplate."
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April 20, 2019
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August 28, 2019
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The Royal Mob; by Theresa Sherman.

The title refers to what Queen Victoria used to call the collective royals of Europe, usually gathering for the weddings and funerals of royals across Europe, apart from visiting one another across the continent and in British isles for summers and more. She was called Grandmama of Europe, related as she was to almost all of them, in fact by the timeline this book begins, she was in fact grandmother to scores of them across Europe, some in line to thrones and going on to acquire them in due course, some being invited to take over monarchies of nations momentarily without a monarch, and so on.

As one reads this, one begins to realise this is centred on Victoria, Princess of Hesse and Rhine, not only because she was a granddaughter namesake of the Empress, and grandmother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and consort of Queen Elizabeth II, but much more.

Princess Victoria married Prince Louis of Battenberg, a cousin of hers who was employed in British Navy, encouraged by her uncle Alfie (the second son of Queen Victoria), who was then Duke of Edinburgh, and she lived her life mostly in Britain, albeit visiting their homes in Germany and various relatives across the continent through years until it was impossible due to WWII. Reading about her life is reading about the history of those years, and persona involved, providing some information, some insights, and more.

But most important, to those that don't quite know the intricate web of the clans of royals of Europe, is that this family of royals of Hesse and Battenberg, related closely to one another before the weddings further bound them closer, was in their generation as much central to the royalty of Europe, as was Queen Victoria being the grandmother of about half and closely related to others too.

Victoria's younger sister Elizabeth married a Grand Duke of Russia, son of Tsar Alexander II, although their cousin Willy who went on to be Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to marry her and did propose, and refused to meet the Russian royals or attend weddings in Russia when spurned by her for sake of cousin Serge whom she did marry; they were already related via his mother and further via his sister in law - Empress Marie the wife of Tsar Alexander I was Victoria's paternal great aunt and sister of her grandfather, while Empress Marie the wife of Tsar Alexander II was sister of Alexandra the then Princess of Wales and later Queen Alexandra of Britain.

And then the youngest of the sisters, Alexandra, although Queen Victoria wanted her to marry her grandson George, instead fell in love with and married Nicholas of Russia, son of Tsar Alexander II, and went on to be the Empress of Russia, which as we all know all too well ended extremely tragically for that family, Tsar Nicholas and Alexandra and their four daughters and the son who was the youngest and afflicted severely with the curse of the whole clan, haemophilia. Meanwhile Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria, eventually was allowed by her mother to marry Louis's brother as she wished, instead of the widower of Queen Victoria's daughter Alice who was mother of Victoria.

As if this is not enough, the third sister Irene married Henry, Prince of Prussia, brother of Willy the Kaiser Wilhelm II and son of their aunt the Empress Augusta Viktoria who was the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. Further, Alice the daughter of Victoria and Louis Battenberg (later changed to Mountbatten) went on to marry a prince of Greece, related to Denmark and Russia once again since the throne of Greece had been offered and taken by the Prince of Denmark, the brother of Queen Alexandra of Britain. Another prince of Greece, brother in law to Alice the daughter of Victoria and Louis Battenberg, was married to Sophie, the daughter of Empress Augusta Victoria who was aunt of Victoria and her sisters - of all grandchildren of Queen Victoria.

There is more, of course, of the web of relationships so very involved. Having constantly referred to the short introduction table given in the first few pages throughout reading the book helps a little. More importantly, one realises quite early during reading that it was all personal to the clan, the quarrels of the nations, the wars, the revolutions, the murders of various relatives, and more. WWII saw the clan not only split forever in reality if not in heart, due to loyalties to their respective nations, but grieving personally at the various disasters, and unable later to meet or attend or invite the relatives across the continent due to the splintering caused by this war. British royalty and not just the Battenberg family were forced to give up their German names and take up English names, and that perhaps was the least, considering just how many relatives they mourned murders of, and later were unable to meet.

At the wedding of the now Queen Elizabeth and her bridegroom Prince Philip who was then newly created Duke of Edinburgh, for example, his sisters the granddaughters of Victoria and Louis Mountbatten were not invited, since they had married into Germany. This royals marrying other royals who were German and usually already relatives was not new, and in fact was facilitated, often encouraged by Queen Victoria for her own grandchildren; but times changed irrevocably post WWII.

One wishes there were a more detailed graph of the various relationships and people, but perhaps a book won't be enough, it would require a net or web that only computer graphics could do justice to - perhaps it could be on internet.

The Last Season; by Robert Joseph.

While one has always despised the snide and derogatory epithet, chicklit, and use of it, it is currently certainly much in use to describe a certain genre, and the genre is about lives of young women and their concerns and occupations, quite as real as those of males of older and cynical, sceptical age. One might like the genre and reconise its being based in reality of the lives of young women, and the genuineness of the writings that fall in this generally. Most of the books in the genre are about young romance, wistful young women, and while once they were about women cruising or attempting to occupy themselves at homes, own or others', now it is about work and balancing lives, and quite often about shopping, fashion, etc, something women aren't allowed to neglect without being thoroughly abused by society generally.

It is disconcerting though, to find a book called The Last Season, written supposedly by a male and not an adolescent young woman attending a writing course in a freshmen seminar at a college and encouraged by her professor to publish it because he thought it was good enough to be published and will sell well, and then read it and find it can only be described as chicklit - albeit with a background of looming WWII, holocaust and all. But so it is, albeit written grippingly enough, but then perhaps the gripping is due to the background. The writing level though does make one suspect it is written by a teenager, researching history and picking a background that would provide glamour, horror and adventure, to add a romance and voila, perfect confection. If only the writing were a bit more polished, thinking that went into this a bit more thourough!

Still, quite enjoyable.

Surviving the Holocaust: The Tales of Survivors and Victims; by Ryan Jenkins.

There is a phrase about judging the book by its cover, and it comes to mind as one is growing perplexed as one reads this book. For the cover shows a couple of very adorable toddlers with the six point star pinned or sewed onto their clothes, looking uncomprehendingly at the camera as normal children do, and the title is "Surviving the Holocaust: The Tales of Survivors and Victims" - so naturally one is led to expect a book telling real stories about those that survived, intimate details and tales as recalled by survivors, and the two kids on the cover in particular.

Instead, this is a very concise, very succinct documentation of the history of the Holocaust and its salient details, beginning with the German surrender and the attitudes at the time, and going into just how and where and when did the executions take place, with a few witnesses that were allowed to live so they were able to tell about it, despite Nazi efforts to the contrary, to cover up the whole massacre of millions. The numbers alone are staggering.

One of the effects of reading this is a surprising realisation about how one forgets one's own deep anger at those that wronged one, however just the anger - not because one subscribes to the doctrine of forgiving all crime and forgetting the victims, but because this horrendous account of what was done to humans by other humans makes one wish to distance oneself from any such emotion that would bring one into the realm of doing anything cruel to anyone even specifically known to be guilty, however they deserve it unlike the victims of Holocaust.

This is not to say one becomes pacifist saint forgiving all crimes and propagating such doctrines, opposing capital punishment for rapists and murderers and so forth, but that one wishes to distance oneself from any emotion that could bring one into the same realm as the sadists who perpetrated the Holocaust, generally and specifically. One could not, would not, belong to the same world as those that did the killings at Babi Yar or Auschwitz or any of the other dozens of places where Nazis exterminated humans - Jews, Roma, communists and other disseters, and more - in such horrible way, and felt superior. One simply could not, would not share in such horrors, not as perpetrators, not as one who even holds such an emotion!

And so it is a must read.

The Vikings; by Robert Wernick.

Perhaps more is known now about Vikings and the exploration of new lands via northern routes, than generally allowed to be assumed publicly, especially in US - children are still taught about discovery of the continent by Columbus as the first person to do so, which is incorrect not only due to the presence of humans on the continent - (which Columbus did not in fact step on, being at one of the islands of Caribbean, and returning therefrom after making his sailors swear they had in fact discovered India, which is the root of the US still referring to indigenous as Indian, knowing fully well that such name is a lie - those people had nothing to do with India) - but also because in fact Nordic Europeans, specifically ones referred to as Vikings, had in fact known about the lands across the ocean, and even had not only stepped on the mainland but lived there for many centuries before dying or giving up and returning, due to the lack then of mass migration.

As one person pointed out (wish one could recall precisely who and where, for reference), the fishing fleets of northern Europe were always venturing further out in the Arctic latitudes in search of more fish, and kept knowledge of lands across ocean to themselves for reasons of keeping their fishing waters from competition and overcrowding.

But the word was bound to be whispered about within the community, and so some were bound to land across ocean in the various new lands - Iceland, Greenland, and the main continent, which acquired its present name after the sailor Amerigo Vespucci only post a voyage after Columbus. The Vikings in fact ventured as far south as Watertown, MA, and traded from posts on the Charles river, as told via the Vikings tower at Waltham on the Charles river.

Wernick goes succinctly but quite thoroughly into history of Vikings as known, describing their society, their ventures into Europe and raids across various nations, conquests and establishing societies in various parts from Ireland, UK, Normandy and Rhineland to southern regions of the Baltic and more, before he describes their ventures across the ocean, which he does not as an amorphous group but with specific names of the people - collected from Vikings' own sagas.

Even apart from the information factor, this work makes for a delightful reading, due to various details of lives of Vikings and also of the new lands, or for that matter the European ones they ventured into. That it wasn't only lack of migration then, which there was little reason for not happening, but the more insurmountable difficulty of a Little Ice Age making the Viking colonies in Greenland difficult to sustain, what with the deep cold making agriculture impossible, and survival difficult.

Also mentioned is another factor - Eskimo migration from regions of Pacific coast across northern Canada to Greenland, and their being far more acclimatised to the cold and better at surviving in the land. Thus the Vikings were pushed out of Greenland completely, but survived in Iceland, albeit with numbers of Scottish and Irish migrants they had taken there as slaves but got integrated instead with, gradually, into a society that merged into one without slavery.

A lesser known fact - lesser for those not professionally historians is about Danelaw; and an amusing one is about how Vikings were defeated in Ireland despite victories in wars!

Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly; by Andrew Cook.

With a life and a character as fascinating, colourful, eventful as this, it is no surprise there are not only a plethora of books about Sidney Reilly but at least one television series - and what is more, films of a whole genre inspired by this character, and his style.

That the James Bond character was created based on this legendary man is the least of the enigma, so fascinating is the figure of this man veiled in mystery.

Born in Russia before revolution, his birth was another mystery, with an established well known wealthy family but a natural father so high up in hierarchy that when at one point he - the son - was assigned the job of toppling the Soviet government he was plausibly the intended figure to lead the revolt and take over in the name of a regime closer to the old monarchy.

He lived during a most turbulent time of history of Europe and the world, and while spying for more than one nation was also a businessman with flair, wealth he created and style he lived in attracting attention and more. He worked for various nations including Britain and Germany, with intrigues that had repercussions on Russia, Japan, Britain, Germany, and more.

Whatever one can find about such a figure of mystery is worth a look.
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And that was what one thought before reading this book, which is very different in spirit from some of the other works about him, the others being more towards what one wrote then, quoted above.

This work by Andrew Cook, however, is more of a  dissection of the legend and attempt to debunk all the mystery and the glory attached, if not outright denouement. Cook does not write a biography or even tell a tale as much as he attempts to dissect all the stories about Reilly, quoting carefully assembled evidence of papers and cables, letters and more, which finally amounts to a "not this, not that" but leaves one with very little except confusion - was Cook trying to destroy the mystery and the legend, deliberately, and to what purpose, since it does not provide a clear picture at all finally?

He does take into account the point about Reilly being a spy for some if not much of the time, and his having created a mystery about himself from the very beginning, with various stories - but only in that he mentions it all painstakingly, in midst of all the debunking of various legendary tales.

Surprisingly enough the one detail he is careful enough to mention is about Reilly having been sent for his final journey into Russia by deceit, by Boyce; this was someone who was supposedly working for the British intelligence, but as it turned out decades later, was a double agent and trapped Reilly deliberately sending him to his death - and that Reilly did not budge despite the best efforts of the captors, and did not give away any details they were not likely to know already or that could have been very important to them. In this he tacitly and almost openly admits Reilly having been the valiant figure as seen by most, after having shredded him through the book relentlessly.

After all, if Reilly was only after his own interests, clearly he would't have gone so silently to his certain death, just to protect the various people and organisations working against the Bolsheviks, which was after all then Russian government, would he? Far more profitable for a profiteer and selfish person to make a deal with his captors to the effect of turning into their agent, for example, and leaving Russia for a cosy life in Britain, surely? His manner of death as described by Cook ironically belies all Cook denounces him for.

The deceit of Boyce, and the fleeting mention of Kim Philby, in the context of this finale, makes one wonder about the author. One wonders fleetingly, having finished the book, whether this strenuous shredding of Reilly until the final chapter when his conduct post his capture exonerates him, is due to a casteist view taken by the author - after all, the repeated disdainful mention about his claiming to be a British national born in Ireland while in reality looking like a Russian Asiatic with Jewish and Mongolian features, does not escape notice. One wonders if this is why Reilly is being debunked in this work while the real double agents who conceivably did much to damage British and allies interests get but a mention at the end.

Or did Cook write shredding the Boyce, Philby and co too?
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Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly (Revealing History)
by Andrew Cook

Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly
by Richard B. Spence

Sidney Reilly: The True Story of the World's Greatest Spy
by Michael Kettle

Britain's master spy;: The adventures of Sidney Reilly;
by Sidney Reilly

Reilly: The First Man
by Robin Bruce Lockhart

Ace of Spies
by Robin Bruce Lockhart

German Spies: Carl Von Ossietzky, Juan Pujol, Mutt and Jeff, Sidney Reilly, Fritz Joubert Duquesne, Alexander Parvus, Kurt Frederick Ludwig.

Inter-War Spies: Sidney Reilly, Gertrude Bell, St. John Philby, Boris Bazhanov, Erich Mielke, Yakov Blumkin, Ernst Wollweber.

Agent Double: Henri Déricourt, Aldrich Ames, Mata Hari, Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Sidney Reilly, Mathilde Carré, Ion Mihai Pacepa.

Japanese Spies: Sidney Reilly, List of Japanese Spies, 1930-45, Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan, John Semer Farnsworth, Akashi Motojiro.

Pre-World War I Spies: Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, Sidney Reilly, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, William Melville, Claude Dansey.

1870s Births: Sidney Reilly, Father Divine, Ma Barker, Albert Sharpe, Clayton Teetzel, Greenbrier Ghost, Auda Ibu Tayi, Charles de Saulles.

Espion de La Première Guerre Mondiale: William Somerset Maugham, St. John Philby, Mata Hari, Sidney Reilly, Louise de Bettignies.

James Bond: Sidney Reilly, James Bond Music, Bond Girl, Outline of James Bond, Gun Barrel Sequence, Inspirations for James Bond, James Bond Jr.

Double Agents: Mata Hari, Juan Pujol, Eddie Chapman, Mutt and Jeff, Donald Maclean, Sidney Reilly, Robert Hanssen, Radu Lecca, Aldrich Ames.

Espion Allemand: Wilhelm Canaris, Heinrich Von Kleist, Mata Hari, Reinhard Gehlen, Sidney Reilly, Violette Morris, Fritz Joubert Duquesne.

Reilly: Ace of Spies (TV Times special)

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 19, 2010
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My Single Friend; by Jane Costello.

This book would be really good without the conscious strewing about of some off things that seems these days to be something perhaps publishers and editors insist on having every otherwise readable book sprinkled with like decorative sprays of red pepper on a dish - but they ought to recall red pepper does not belong in every cup of tea or milk. Other than that it is a bit long or just unable to hold the reader.

Just after this I started on an Austen work, which belongs to early eighteenth century as for the time period the book describes, and is comparatively far less eventful. And yet it holds the reader unlike Costello's contrived fast paced and twisted tale, which was a bit of hard work to finish.

Austen was a young woman when she wrote, so why couldn't writers of today learn a thing or two about what makes for a good reading is beyond one's imagination.

The Encyclopaedia of Earth - A Complete Visual Guide: by Michael Allaby, John O'Byrne.

Even an a cursory glance at the book prior to purchase is impressive enough ( -hence the purchase in the first place!) - what with the part illustrating solar system and its planets and other fascinating objects before going on to Earth, our own planet. Then there is the geophysical parts and other about Earth. All in all a must in a home aspiring for well educated family, especially with growing children. In a school library, needless to say, it is indispensable.

As a matter of fact one might as well have children familiar with it when young, before they are corrupted by the peer cynicism against knowledge so very prevalent in some of the richer nations where being well informed gets a child bullied in school and a football jock or anyone capable of bullying is the object of worship, and tobacco-alcohol-and-co seem cool, partying a must and study merely a painful requisite for sat unless one has a cool career in hand such as a garage mechanic or a sport scholarship to push one through college all the way without any reading skills.

In parts of the world where knowledge and information are still valued, this book is a valuable addition to any home, any library.

Three Novels of Society The Country House, Fraternity, The Patrician; by John Galsworthy.

The Country House:-


One reads The Forsyte Saga trilogy, and wants more, and goes on to search out the rest of the tale about the characters one is so involved in by now, Irene and Jon most of all. Irene remains elusive and if anything more so than through the first trilogy, but one gets more of people related to Forsytes, and of beauty of England and some insights of social life and political state of the country and the world of that era. One finishes Forsyte Chronicles, three trilogies, nine books each of which is further three parts, and two in each trilogy connecting the parts. And one wants more. So one goes on to other writings of Galsworthy.

And one is not disappointed. Only, rather than go forth, one gets a view, an insight into how Forsyte Saga and Chronicles came to be the finished, polished, elusive portraits of the time and life veiled with a very English poetic mist wafting over the whole tale.

The Country House is set as the title would tell one in a country house, primarily, and the village life in general of that time, the mindsets still entrenched in the traditions and caste system of that time and place, but the people evolving at their own speeds of comfort.

A woman unwilling to live with her husband is at the centre of this work, with the peripheral people vivid as usual with the author. How her decision to separate affects people, how her involvement impacts on them, how they deal with the questions of divorce and involvement and questions of whether a woman may leave her husband and still be respectable, is the work.

There is the rector who is unable to deal with his wife's tenth confinement and the question of whether she will survive it, and with her contempt and pity for him hidden well until her moment of agony when she still smiles at him and tells him to go for his usual walk - and he never connects it in his conscious mind to his condemnation of the woman divorcing her husband for moral reasons. The opposite are the squire and his wife and son, each of whom deals with the same woman in a different way, but more humane and more civil. And the heartening part is, the husband she separated from is not automatically held up as free of guilt and full of innocence - rather, everyone including the rector is quite honest about how he is no better than the wife but merely has more rights to possess the woman since he is the man.

This admission of the skewed basis therefore makes them able to look at the whole question in a more honest way, and to go as far as he or she might with comfort with one's inner core, into the question of a woman's being a person in her own right rather than a mere possession and chattel bound and branded by her husband's right to her.

Not that these questions are now universally solved to satisfaction of justice much less satisfaction of everyone, especially those not willing to grant a personhood of a woman, but that era was the beginning of such questioning and thought in Europe. Tolstoy solved it by having Anna Karenina miserable with her choice of going away with her lover, unable to love her daughter by her lover, pining for the son she has by the husband she is unable to live with, and unable to feel secure in her love, committing suicide at the end symbolic of her choice of love over respectability of unhappy marriage stifling her heart - the choice that was a social suicide for her.

Galsworthy is kinder and more honest in that he does not attempt to satisfy all regressive or closed minds, much less authorities of the kind that attempt to rule personal lives by impersonal laws same for all, but rather shows a whole spectrum of people that deal with these questions in different ways, thus freeing the reader to think and feel and explore one's own heart and mind and thought, while looking at the portrayal by the author.

Thursday, October 17, 2013
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Monday, October 21, 2013.
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Fraternity:- 
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The Patrician:-
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Monday, November 11, 2013.
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Arranged Marriage (1995): Stories; by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Even without checking with the date of publication, this seems to be an early work by the author, going by content and the raw quality, and the germs of later works of hers one finds here. At that, the themes she explores later with a more wide canvas in other works are worth it, and some others one wishes as one reads she would revisit and explore more. The latter fits for example the separations and self discoveries that women come through, which might be a description of more than one or two of these stories.

Here she is looking at lives of women from India living in US, either having arrived as brides unfamiliar with all but rudimentary level of familiarity with English language and west and US generally, or a later generation culturally if not in time of women who are living in US as students, pursuing an academic life, and not quite separated from mainstream life there either, as the brides are.

The readership she might have found uncertain, in that most readers from US would find this only marginally interesting if that, since India in general and Indian culture in particular are baffling to most west and a facile attitude of derision or outright hostility are often easier for those not quite brought up to see good in others even if unfamiliar. Readership from India might have been equally questionable, on the whole, since the author is so courageous in exploring lives of women from India living in US, and dealing with intimate details of life. Few are really bothered or willing to see reality of these concerns, and most would call it a few names and leave it at that. So courage it must have been for the author to be open in writing about lives of women and their concerns, without objectifying them, as most people do in every corner of the globe.

One is glad she did have such courage and wrote.

Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer; by Maloy Krishna Dhar.

First and mostly, one might be grateful for being able to read this account of three decades of life of the author as an intelligence officer, at all. That it was allowed to be published seems a miracle, and while India is not an iron curtain or bamboo curtain state, such an account published even from someone of similar stature in UK or US would be just as much a reason for a reader to marvel at being able to read about what goes on behind the veils of government workings and politics.

Not that the author exposes what must not be done, and he often enough makes it clear explicitly. Still, there is much in terms of facts not generally known to public as such, and even while one discounts for subjective opinions and feelings of the author, one is quite astounded and daunted reading this account. That makes up for the few shortcomings of the writing to begin with, even though one comes across them all the while as one reads.

One such not so serious shortcoming is about language and small mistakes therein, which a good editor could have corrected. For that matter often writings of this nature are helped immensely by use of a professional writer so it is easier to read, too, but then both or either of these would have detracted from the original purpose of the book, which was to publish the manuscript as it was written by the author and found by his son.

Amongst other details that emerge here enabling a reader to see the picture in detail, an important one is about how the party that ruled for most of almost seven decades played it for power by hook or by crook post Nehru era. Apart from politics played in various states, and especially in the sensitive border states, all the more so in sensitive border states of Punjab and in Northeast, one single but horrendous detail that stands out is re protests sparked by infamous Mandal commission report that the government in late eighties attempted to implement.

It was obvious to anyone who watched the protests in Delhi by young students that the first boy who supposedly immolated himself and died, really did nothing of the sort - he was desperately trying to survive and was not allowed to; it is unimaginable that his fellow students would do anything but save him, do everything possible to save him, so it was obvious something else was afoot.

Dhar tells the readers, categorically, about the Indira congress conspiracy behind this - how they had promised to save him, told him to wear three trousers which he did, and then double crossed him reneging on their promises to save him, by pouring fuel rather than water on him (reminds one of the Lahore fire department pouring fuel instead of water on Hindu homes during partition when their neighbours and general Muslim mobs set fire to Hindu homes); this callousness by congress about lives of innocent Indian citizens is not new in view of all Dhar discloses, especially re Punjab, even re intelligence operatives, but does somehow stand above, being about a hapless young boy unsuspecting about congress using his (completely unintended by him) death to return to power.

And since by this time the party was a single family rule, one loses any vestiges of sympathy for those that were then and have been since at the helm.

Of course the most horrifying disclosure comes at the end, shedding a very different light on a late prime minister of India who was known more for his learned persona than for a questionable act at any time. That Dhar was punished for what was a confusion and blunder of several other characters in the drama despite his altogether correct behaviour, both in interests of his nation and in terms of official proprieties, only horrifies one more.

But then this last one is only one explicit wrong committed by political needs is amply clear in light of the various security lapses allowed by the so called or self termed secular parties in sphere of national security and awareness re operatives of terror export nations infiltrating agents in India, both via illegal migrations with aim of taking over whole territories and terror strikes via official visitors who simply disappear in the nation due to laxity on part of authorities in various states tom-tomming their secular credentials, as directed by the political leaders of the so called secular parties.

In this larger picture and the specific last incident both, while some officials might be to blame such as the IB boss in the last incident who was far less than required for his post, most blame lies with the political leaders who direct and decide policies re intelligence and security, as is also amply clear from this account. If police and intelligence operatives were used by the said so called secular political leaders for spying on opposition and told not to bother the agents of the terror export nation, they cannot be much faulted for towing the line in interest of their families' security and well being, and not wishing to be threatened physically or terminated wrongfully.

One surprising little detail one could mention is about how this author, like Guha, another of his community - Bengali - who is officially a historian, is about how both are so surprisingly so incorrect in something one would expect any Indian with a bringing up in India, and all the more so a Hindu, to know better about.

Both these well educated people state Krishna as being from Gujarat, which in light of how steeped in Krishna lore India is for millennia, is astounding. But Dhar had another surprising lack of awareness regarding the epic Mahabhaarata, which is that he does not recall  Naagaas or Nagas being mentioned in Mahaabhaarata - and he should, since one of the most favourite names for a male in Bengal is Paartha or Paartho, a name of Arjuna, who was married to Chitraangadaa, a princess of Bengal (from Manipur as going by lines on map of today). She was the third wife of Arjuna, and the fourth was Uloupie the princess of Nagas or Naagaas, known also as Naagakanyaa or daughter of Naagaas. This relates to the word Naaga, understood throughout India to mean serpent or snake, worshipped generally but more specifically on Naagapanchamie, a festival day allotted to them.

And yet, Dhar seems to think the term or name Naaga has quite another meaning, related to a sect of monks - wonder if he is the only person so confused or there is a general confusion in Bengal? Then again, it might be that a background of East Bengal is the reason for this lack of comprehension re the difference of the two meanings of the word Naaga, one an ancient meaning and used all over India while other (related to the monks sect) more of a recent one, due mostly to reverence for the monks making India unwilling to use the precise word for naked and instead using a word similar but meaning snake.

On the whole a must read for anyone remotely interested in India as defined by the political boundaries of today but India as defined and understood since antiquity, which is the region in general.

Flood of Fire: (Ibis Trilogy, #3); by Amitav Ghosh.

But for the small and completely unnecessary part where the author decides to go explicit beyond necessity of the tale into the nether personal details of his characters, either because his publishers like many others of the day thought this was a good way to catch those readers that won't read the book for its worth, or because at this age the author has second thoughts about being clean, whatever the reason that brings this book for a while into level of disgusting and questionable - at that point one isn't quite certain the writing will ever recover from the level it has sunk to - but for that part, this book would have been worthy of being rated excellent beyond par, in bringing out so much of history mostly ignored in traditional history as taught in most places.

At that, one is taken aback when in the epilogue the author mentions that further history would need a dozen more works from him to go into the diaries and other documents brought out by the descendent of Neel, and it might be the first inkling one is given that the whole tale might just be all about characters that in fact did exist. One does take it for granted that most of the better known ones were in fact historical, as are the various details about the opium wars UK imposed on China for sake of being allowed to sell opium which China had legally banned, but one is unaware for most part during reading the trilogy that the minor characters were just as historical.

About how one feels, there isn't much doubt - one applauds the emergence of a woman from home to the world; one pities the seemingly white Reid forever in danger of being discovered as officially identified "black" in manifesto of the ship he began on from US, even as one is revolted by his revenge for being spurned by the woman in love with another, and is finally glad he is likely to find redemption in love of the excellent Paulette Lambert, the botanist; one is forever on tenterhooks wondering if the author is going to have a father and son unwittingly on opposite sides of the battle a la Rustom Sohrab, and glad that such an event doesn't quite take place, despite it being imminent most of the time, and that they meet and escape safely; one weeps for the tragic love story of the young couple, Mrs. Burnaham and Captain Mee, that was separated because he is too low a caste for her parents, who meet again half a world away and end so tragically only because they are in fact both good, far better than those close to them that did survive such as her husband and his partner at the end who was the catalyst in the two deaths; one is glad Kalua or Maddow Calver is alive, and is able to save Kesari Singh the elder brother of Deeti, who is present in the tale albeit not physically, but live and well half a world away; one is taken with pity for the unfortunate half Chinese, half Parsi Ah Fatt renamed Freddie Lee, with his Parsi name mostly forgotten after his father died, pity evoked for him for most part in spite of his not always being good, or innocent - he after all did trap Reid; and so on.

But more than anything else this finale of the trilogy is important in giving a good picture of the geopolitical realities of the era, in how China was beleaguered with western onslaught in name of freedom of trade, how poor from India were used not only as workers and bonded labour for British enterprise but also as poor soldiers - never quite on part with their "white" counterparts - to battle, kill, put down poor of other nations in Asia, and hence forever hated by those they were used against; and more.

The author does specialise in bringing history to his readers in a story form, but the trilogy is definitely his crowning work.

India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power; by Pamela Mountbatten.

Most of this is quite familiar if one has read the author's biographical account in 'Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten'.Up to one third of this book is almost verbatim in that one, with few differences, and latter part too is familiar from having read that, albeit being a bit more detailed here.

The main charm here is entries from diaries verbatim, although it doesn't mean one is reading entire diaries of course, and even more so, photographs of various towering characters of that era, not seen often elsewhere. There are some nice ones of Jawaharlal Nehru, of course, and a couple deserve mention - one of him pensive, and another where he is at tea with the author's mother Edwina Mountbatten with his daughter and her (presumably elder) son, thus one looking at three future prime ministers of India amongst the four figurers seen. Indira here looks very young, shy, smiling, and more beautiful than most professional beauties of the time even without any make up or any expensive attire or decorations.

Pamela Mountbatten's account is valuable in many other ways too of course, in that one reads about various important events and about people of the time. For example one reads of and too sees in the photographs the crowds at various occasions, too thick to allow the dignitaries to walk without walking on sitting people and yet all calm, friendly, non threatening - as also the author mentions repeatedly. The charm and friendliness of Gandhi and Nehru, beloved figures in India, and the cold persona of Jinnah impervious to any friendly overtures, focused on his aims.

Pamela Mountbatten repeatedly attempts to balance her and her family's love of India against accusations by various sources (chiefly from Pak and US) about paritiality, but fact is their love for India was for all of India, whole of which included the parts that were then cut off to divide the nation to provide another new nation for those intolerant of living with people of other faiths. Whether from Mountbattens or from leaders and people of India, there never was any dearth of love for people thus separated from India, even when there was dire opposition to the idea of dividing the nation.

The author minimises the account of sufferings of refugees they saw in camps, mentioning but not going into the heart rending tales of what they suffered, but the photographs seen of devastations in Lahore and other parts of Punjab tell the tale silently. The streets obviously lined with tall homes of the prosperous are reduced to resemble archaeological discoveries of ancient times and one can only imagine the travails of the people driven out by the massacres in the photographs of the visit by Mountbattens, even though no suffering ones are seen - that is taken care of by the authorities, evidently, before allowing the visit.

Pamela Hicks, nee Mountbatten, is very sensitive to various accusations against her father as the last viceroy, for example the accusation of haste of withdrawal without caring for the human devastation left behind, made amongst others by the author of Shameless Flight, and presumably others, possibly only from those from US. She reasons that without such haste in handing over power, the devastation would have been worse - which neither can really predict, even with hindsight.

What is undoubtedly true is the devastating account of the massacres let loose by order of Jinnah in Calcutta on 16th August 1946 in the name of Direct Action Day, to remove all doubts from minds of leaders of Congress and from the British about what his intentions were if his demands of a separate piece of India were not given to him wrenched away from mainland of India. She mentions the number of massacred at 20,000 during that day and couple of days on, and this was without guns, chiefly with knives. Until that massacre Congress and indeed most of India was against such division of the ancient land, separating people, neighbours, families - but this massacre and the unspoken threat delivered by this massacre of more to come if the demand by Jinnah were not met, broke the resolve of Gandhi and others, and they gave in to the partition that then resulted in not only a million deaths by massacres but ten times that many rendered homeless, driven out of their homes and lands and regions to cross borders for sake of life. What the result would have been if the demand were not met is anybody's guess.

But those that know more and are not bound to cover for sake of various political reasons speak of this whole idea of partition being born or at least coming to reality during days of WWII when Berlin was occupied by Red Army, and Churchill realised need of a strategically posed military base in a nation that would allow this, for sake of what is termed The Great Game, which was the tussle of European powers for world domination and mainly about the play in west and central Asia. India led by a non partisan government was not about to allow military bases to be used by US and UK for attacks on USSR, which Jinnah had no problem promising - hence, in those immediate days, the partition of India.

Now of course it ought to be obvious to anyone not blinded by needs to prevaricate that this is what inevitably resulted in the now so horribly far from containable genie of terrorism, let loose over decades by the new nation created for purpose of war against an ancient one by breaking up another ancient land. That this terrorism was going to bite those that created it ought to have been obvious to anyone not blinded by preferences driven by skin colour seems obvious to those not so blinded, of course. That such preferences often get buried under equally silly preferences for monotheistic and preferably conversionistic faiths is sign of even more convolution of thinking.

As is of course the bias setting up one gender superior to another in humanity on basis of ability to physically overpower, which logically extended sets up buffaloes over men, as does defining male superior by virtue of organ set up male donkeys superior to human males. But then few are really used to question assumptions concrete in society, need of comfort of being with others being paramount to social animals.

One of the endearing factors about this and the other account by the author is the evident love of hers and her parents for people across such dividing lines in humanity, and coming from a family close to royals then ruling empires girdling the world, this is all the more special.  That she mentions India returning this love without reservations, and her realising and mentioning how much more special it is in face of the hardships endured by various people, is all the more so endearing.

The Enemies of the Idea of India; by Ramachandra Guha

The author attempts to play safe, a la television channels in US giving equal time to both sides, which has been attempted not so successfully in television in India - for example in a case of rape and murder the anchor might give equal time to both sides, and this can be made to look like the victim's side is being vindictive while the criminal being forgiven is the only way for you to be not papally disapproved and be set on par with the rapist and murderer, unless of course you can be set below for not having felt guilty of everything and begged for mercy - which no one demands from the murderer and rapist a convincing demonstration of, especially if he is being tried, or was convicted for a couple of years.

Guha thus holds people and parties guilty of seriously injuring interests of nation and responsible for massacres on par or not quite as guilty as those that would hold that majority of India is not slave and beneath respect for eternity, having committed the crime of being ruled rather than convert en masse or be massacred as per demand by the rulers from other cultures for over a millennium.

As usual with people who label or accept labels without thought, he too identifies Hindu with traders and right wing, never mind majority is poor or desperately poor, and more. This label has a very convoluted sort of reasoning - leftists of India had gone over a to set up across to the separated part of India set up then as the nation for those intolerant of living with people of other faiths, thus identifying leftists with muslims, and anyone whom muslims would not live with as therefore right wing. This further is used in labeling or identifying all those as not only right wing but also as business or more disparagingly as trading community. That the so labelled communities whether Hindu or Jewish or western in general have also intellectuals, great thinkers and philosophers, inventors and scientists and writers and music maestros and artists of all sorts, is ignored, since the only criteria is whether you are a killer and marauding looter or merely a trader. Values are thus set topsy turvy in all thought and discourses from those that hold terrorism as a superior creed.

Guha holds, like all good kids so labelled by their education oriented to west rather than within the nation, that India is an idea, and without saying so explicitly seems to drive the reader to conclude that it was an invention of those not of India but looking from anywhere else, and that those of India have no choice in that matter - thus negating the reality of the nation he does not exactly deny belonging to but deprecated at all levels.

So it is almost a small corollary that invasions, massacres and looting by invaders, forced conversions at knife or sword points held to throats, and enforced slavery in all but name, et al - suffered by those indigenous that would not convert - is all a non sequitur pretty much as wages of slave labour denied to slaves and their descendents in US are held non sequitur in all but explicit statement; Guha goes with labeling all those invasions, looting and massacres under the seemingly non invasive, almost friendly term of "cultural impact", as if those invading and marauding and massacring and more were no more than stones set hurtling down by an avalanche, without any will or thought or guilt, no more to blame than an el nino or el nina. He denies humanity to them in the process, perhaps unaware of this, as a consequence of holding them not guilty of their actions as full adults but ascribing to them an innocence one might ascribe to the landslide or earthquake.

He, like another author from his region, surprisingly is halfway ignorant of his heritage and nation to a degree and context very unexpected - he mentions Krishna as one from Gujarat, never mind India steeped for millennia in stories and songs about Krishna, in literature and music and homes - favourites among tales told children by parents and grandparents - and completely saturated with the lore of origins and childhood, even young adulthood, of Krishna being of ancient city of Mathura and its immediate neighbourhood, while the coastal city of Dwaarakaa in Gujarat (and its ancient version discovered submerged in ocean off coast) are credited to Krishna as having created for his kingdom, after he migrated with his people to avoid a civil war that would kill thousands of innocents - which was ultimately forced anyway, on the good people willing to live in peace, by those intent on swallowing the whole, pretty much as WWII was forced despite all sorts of concessions by all attempting to placate a central power intent on swallowing Europe and the world, both times aims being to end civilisation.

Guha wrote this as an essay in a weekly that is not unknown for such disparaging writing about India and her own, but this fact is only given at the end, rather than in the information about the book - which isn't really a book at that, merely a piece of propaganda that fails in facts.

One major failure is unexpected of someone officially a scholar of history, namely, his assertion about someone being Indian, while facts of legality are otherwise. He can simply brand those pointing at facts as being communal, intolerant et al, but fact is he is either a shoddy scholar or is lying, as are those making this particular assertion.

But in this case, while one can easily understand someone - anyone - trying to hold on to a citizenship of a seemingly safer part of the world, especially when not related to India except by marriage, falsifying it by claiming that marriage amounts to citizenship whether accepted or not by the person is simply rubbish. Which is not discordant with the essay parading as a book, either - it is garbage mixed with some not so much garbage and covered in sauce so mix is concealed decoratively. 

The Viceroy's Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sister; by Anne De Courcy.

After reading Sheila by Robert Wainwright and then Daughter of the Empire by Pamela Hicks about her life as a Mountbatten, this one is more about life of the upper caste set in England, with a lot of same names and the same general lives of theirs in that era, of parties ad cruises and affairs and so on, especially when it came to heiresses and other rich women - household and children concerns were taken care of by professionals, with little personal contact generally between parents and children, and adults who did not have enough to occupy them being on the whole wasted leading lives of trying to find pleasure and excitement, and so on. This waste of life wasn't limited to women, one way or another - men were often just as wasted, as exemplified by more than one character in the society described in the three books. Thus Sheila's first husband, Lord Loughborough, wasted his life in gambling and so forth, while others described in this book or the other two conducted affairs and did little else that could be construed positive so as to set off against the negatives.

But this book goes more into details of the personal lives, problems, details of relationships and unhappy lives, not only of daughters of Lord Curzon but generally of the whole set, and makes one even more disillusioned with any thought of money bringing happiness by setting one free of cares and worries. What's more, it goes further, to bring one to despise several characters central and peripheral - beginning with Curzon who stole his daughters' money, especially the eldest one Irene, and then severed relationship with her when she eventually demanded probity of accounts, and all this not because he wished to save them from spending at young age and so forth, but sheer selfishness to the point well beyond theft. He gave much of their inheritance away, including the personal jewellery willed by their mother, and the monies from their mother's father, to his second wife, only to be cheated in almost every way - she not only had another lover, but managed to avoid him most of their married life, by travelling to another place wherever he happened to be, and writing to the effect that while she missed him the children were happier in the other place.

Not that she didn't repeat his mistakes at that - having taken the girls' inheritance, and kept most of the houses and castles Curzon kept buying with their money, after his death she gambled it away by heeding her lover's inclinations, and was reduced to economies too!

And this pattern, of the virtuous coming to grief and being ill treated by those that are not so virtuous, repeats in the lives of the daughters too - Irene leads and independent life and uses much of her life for works of charity, and takes up caring for the children of her sisters, while the youngest one goes about merrily with several love affairs conducted simultaneously with various members of their set of society of aristocracy and glitterati and so forth, and is not just thankless to the elder one but positively abominably rude, over years - and this is indeed inexplicable except when one realises that it is based on the caste system imposed on (and accepted by most) women, that of married and young and sexy being always the ones that get away with any despicable behaviour while those not married are used, looked down on and treated abominably.

Divorce being seen as taboo in such social system where affairs conducted discreetly are seen as norm, and by discreet it doesn't mean secret and unknown but not seen explicitly in public, is about as hypocritical as impeachment of a president of US for an affair, or the muck thrown at Charlie Chaplin for that matter for an allegation of a child out of wedlock. Still, this was the way they lived then, and perhaps a lot many societies still do too - Princess Diana was after all denied the HRH title post her divorce, while the replacement merely has a lesser than Wales title.

This being the state of west, one can only set the graph of other social systems as amount of distance they keep from stoning of those women that are independent, wear clothes not prescribed by the particular region or not necessarily hold every male as one to simper and kowtow to. Most societies, such independence and daring to hold oneself human on par brings a woman brickbats from men and women alike, not all but most, unless she happens to be of what is perceived as "upper" strata, by power and wealth and race.

And Irenes of this world die lonely.
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The real shocker to those unfamiliar with the facts before reading is about Mosley - and about how close the social set skirted to fascism, despite knowing it won't do, not in England. Even in personal life he is one of the most unsavoury characters and one wonders how and why people put up with such conduct, his using his wife so ill and even apart from affairs galore, being a wolf in the sense of hunting women for the sake of power, and being a true successor to Curzon in stealing the money in that he uses homes and money paid for by his wife's fortune for his purposes, plans to deprive his children and insists his sister in law pays for the home his children live in! And yet, even post several instances of his misbehaviour, his paramour and the younger sister in law uses her influence with various males to get him a better deal with his imprisonment, even getting him free!
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But for Irene this book would leave a reader completely disgusted, and her having to play subservient to Mosley or Alexandra Metcalfe despite their ill treating their very loving and nice partners does not leave a good taste either.
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Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten; by Pamela Hicks.

Having just finished Sheila by Robert Wainwright, this comes as a pleasant surprise, unexpected because one would think British upper caste is all about stiff upper lips, reticence, et al - and who is more upper caste than descendants of Queen Victoria? And Wainwright was all so very correct and reticent, which while being entirely proper was a bit tiresome, since the life he described of the rich and aristocrats of England and related parts of the world - which encompassed half the globe, at that, what with British empire and Europe, and US glitterati too, seemed all about partying and so forth.

But this one is very different in texture while still being entirely proper too, very readable and very enjoyable. So if Pamela Mountbattern did not have help of a professional shadow writer to trim this, at the very least, then she was remarkably good at writing, which is not as surprising if not famous, what with her descriptions of how intelligent and active her mother was, even apart from the royal family regimen of active life.

One of the positively reassuring little factors in this book is the conclusion of the daughter about her mother's relationship with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru being entirely within the intellectual sphere and platonic, which might have had strong affection and attachment but not a physical intimacy component, and definitely not more than what is decently admissible in public. This is believable not only due to her reasoning - they were always surrounded by people and had no possibility of privacy - but also due to her candid descriptions of her parents conducting their separate lives and travelling with or being visited by their respective paramours as a part of extended family, and their acceptance of one another's privacy and needs. And while from another "white" source such an assertion of a relationship being non physical might make one wonder if this was for a different reason, on reading this book one generally must conclude this wasn't so. Mountbattens as family did not support racism and reacted emotionally disapprovingly to such expressions in their hearing, according to Pamela Mountbatten - and her father understood the need and value of Nehru in his wife's life and found it freeing him from worrying about her, too.

Several times in reading this one breaks into smiles or chuckles or more, for instance the stories about the various exotic pets from various corners of the world they brought home as gifts or by choice, or about the family stories related to various cousins, which included the royals, not only of England either but of most of Europe. Pamela's grandmother talking about Willie casually, and her explaining when the mystified would be new member (fiancé of the elder sister Patricia Mountbatten) asked who Willie was, that it was "the Kaiser of course", is just one such fun little story.

The Bell Jar; by Sylvia Plath.

Not an easy read, especially post the New York part, and even in that, but perhaps one needs to be a bit familiar with social fabric of US and history thereof, where women at this period of time had not quite achieved parity (not that they have now, it is a curve sometimes closer to the asymptote and then again slashed back viciously by corporate interests), and while they were able to attend college and thereby expected to do brilliantly and also confirm to stereotype expectations anyway, but were often treated somewhere between callously and viciously, as indeed in most places with Judaic and especially church of Rome dominated or worse, that of complete veil or stoning to death cultures.

This book was probably one of the first to bring home to most people the fact that a woman could not only think but do so in a very erudite, complex, sophisticated way, and yet have sensitivity and more. Most works moreover dealing with the social phenomena of throwing unwanted women in mental asylums, or with mental breakdowns of brilliant people of either gender, deal with it from outside, and this is one of the inside views. 

Sheila: The Australian ingenue who bewitched British society; by Robert Wainwright.

Sheila: The Australian ingenue who bewitched British society; by Robert Wainwright.


One begins with an intriguing opening about someone elderly arriving home after a lifetime spent across the world, in glitterati society as someone who takes it all naturally, and yet is more regal in spite of being very natural, very casual about it all - wondering if this person was real.

It is a bit disappointing to realise this is a halfway compromise between biography and gossip chronicles cleansed with hints of alliances but more details of who attended what wearing what, not because one wishes more gossip, rather the opposite - because one was expecting more in depth about the world as it was during the era. After all this person lived in very interesting times, and being disappointed with the book halfway through when it has arrived slowly to just before beginning of WWII is no mean achievement in being a court appointed cleaner of royal reputations.

Of course, it could become suddenly interesting, but seems doubtful going by what three quarters of it has been so far.

Wonder if this author is related to, or same as, the person who tried to put across a face saving "they were applauding the song, not the speech" despite truth being observed by the whole world (and as it was watched on live television, too) obviously to the contrary?
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Friday, May 13, 2016.
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Funnily enough the relevance comes through at the end when it is mentioned why the author took up the project at all - it was an elusive reference to Sheila in a biography of the king, her friend of many years during youth when he was Prince Bertie, along with the then Prince of Wales - it was clear that the mention of Sheila was rare because she had been a chief love in life of the then prince, which intrigued the publisher and thus the book proposal. The author mentions just how difficult it was to find material about this person so elusive on fringes of so many glitterati lives, and that the book was only possible because the material was made available by the various sources.

But the book does become interesting, as expected, in the last four tenth or so part - partly it is due to the WWII and post WWII world, and partly it is due to her finally finding peace with a Russian prince in exile, Dimitri Romanoff. He was introduced on the first page, but came later in her life as a main figure.
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Wednesday, May 18, 2016.
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He That Will Not When He May; by Margaret Wilson Oliphant.

Very surprising one finds oneself reading this book, in that this author is not as well known as deserved for sheer quality of writing. And she supported her three children with her writing, which amounts to her being not insignificant in her day, which was just over a century ago. Why her books are not as well read as those of Jane Austen, Bronte sisters or Galsworthy, cannot be only due to some similarities in writing, thinking or themes - Galsworthy came after, for one thing.

Her social setting and thought is generally reminiscent of Austen, while the era is more of or closer to Bronte sisters, what with the West Indies adventures of the younger sons and complications arising therefrom due to entailed estates, needs of younger sons to find a livelihood and possibly also an advantageous match, which if happened abroad didn't always go well with the younger sons so wed abroad returning home due to change in circumstances.

This work deals with difficulties of such marriages abroad with a different facet thereof, albeit reminding one of Jane Eyre. Funny part is, it is Jane Eyre that is more of romantic in comparison, while this one is more realistic in almost every way.

And yet, in a style with not so bold strokes as Charlotte Bronte, rather closer to Austen in plain but a bit subtler, closer to Galsworthy, the author here brings contrast of the two sons vividly home, with one brought up to expect nobility and riches and estates and more, playing with socialism and equality seriously until he is brought face to face with never having had any right to what he was so easily willing to or at least declaring he would throw away for sake of social equality, while the elder who quietly but emphatically asserts his rights to his place yet being noble about sharing everything with his new found family and reassuring them over and over about how he intends to cherish them, and doing so. Paul is tall and looks the part, while Augustus is short and looks like his dad, but it is Sir Augustus, not Sir Paul, and long after having finished the book this point remains like a subtle fragrance lingering.

This is even more emphasised with the mother of Paul, the good looking and amiable noble lady, melting all her objections to a match for her daughter when it is mentioned that the very desirable but unfortunately lacking in gentility of lineage suitor is extremely rich.

The political thought of the author is closer to Galsworthy, however, with questions of rights and castes of Europe taking for granted their privileges or deprivations for the most part, and this author is possibly less subtle about it.

One wonders,naturally, having read this author and others similar who are good but comparatively lesser known, if fashion forms a part of popularity and critical judgement of worthy critics either falls away or falls short in presenting readership with a plethora of decent works by good authors.