From : Thelegraph.co.uk
Photo : Thelegraph.co.uk
A fascinating history traces the mundane lives of Nazi war criminals .
If there’s anything people love more than a mystery, it’s a conspiracy. Blend them together and spice with top Nazi war criminals, and you have a shelf of sensational paperbacks, many of them selling in the hundreds of thousands. Guy Walters’s book about the hunt to bring the war criminals to justice is different. While not sparing us details of their atrocities, it is not sensationalist. It is very thoroughly researched. And rarer still of all, it is true.
More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, there are still Nazi mass murderers and concentration camp guards among us who have escaped real justice. Over a bottle of red wine, Walters interviewed Erich Priebke, a sprightly nonagenarian living in a comfortable Rome flat, who in 1944 helped gather together 335 Italians for a reprisal killing, after 33 German policemen had been killed by a bomb the day before. Priebke collected the men and checked them into a cave where SS men shot them in the back of the head. As the bodies mounted, victims were forced to climb the bleeding pile to be added to it. Erna Wallisch, formerly a guard at the death camps of Ravensbrück and Majdanek, was the seventh most wanted Nazi war criminal on the Wiesenthal Centre’s list: she had beaten women and children towards the gas chambers. She lived peacefully in Vienna where she was protected by a statute of limitations. Protected by her neighbours too, since Austria, which in 1986 elected as its president a former Nazi officer complicit in genocide, has taken a more liberal view of these matters. Walters could only take her picture before she slammed her door.
More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, there are still Nazi mass murderers and concentration camp guards among us who have escaped real justice. Over a bottle of red wine, Walters interviewed Erich Priebke, a sprightly nonagenarian living in a comfortable Rome flat, who in 1944 helped gather together 335 Italians for a reprisal killing, after 33 German policemen had been killed by a bomb the day before. Priebke collected the men and checked them into a cave where SS men shot them in the back of the head. As the bodies mounted, victims were forced to climb the bleeding pile to be added to it. Erna Wallisch, formerly a guard at the death camps of Ravensbrück and Majdanek, was the seventh most wanted Nazi war criminal on the Wiesenthal Centre’s list: she had beaten women and children towards the gas chambers. She lived peacefully in Vienna where she was protected by a statute of limitations. Protected by her neighbours too, since Austria, which in 1986 elected as its president a former Nazi officer complicit in genocide, has taken a more liberal view of these matters. Walters could only take her picture before she slammed her door.
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