The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands

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From the author of the internationally acclaimed, best-selling East West Street, a tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and "the Ratline," the Nazi escape route to Peron's Argentina.

Baron Otto von Wachter: Viennese lawyer, husband, father; Nazi; senior SS officer; colleague of Henrich Himmler; governor of Galicia during the war; creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto; indicted as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles and Jews; four years on the run, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal -- only to reach a mysterious end before he found the freedom he did not deserve.

Philippe Sands pieces together, in fascinating detail, Wachter's extraordinary, shocking story. Given full access to the Wachter family archives -- journals, diaries, tapes, and more -- and with the assistance of the Wachters' son Horst, who believes his father to have been "a good man," Sands writes of Wachter's rise through the Nazi high command, his "blissful" marriage to Charlotte and family life, as their world is brought to ruin, and his flight to escape justice -- to the Tirol, to Rome, and the Vatican. Given a new identity and life via "the Ratline" to Peron's Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and thousands of other Nazis, Wachter and his escape plan were cut short by his mysterious, shocking death in Rome. In the midst of the burgeoning Cold War, was he being recruited in postwar Italy by the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, or by the Soviet NKVD -- or by both? Or was he poisoned by one side or the other, as his son believes -- or by both?

An extraordinary and riveting work of history told up-close through access to a unique trove of family correspondence between Wachter and his wife, The Ratline is part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, part Cold War espionage thriller.

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Alfred A. Knopf, Hardcover, 1st Edition, Later Printing, 2020