Genre: Nonfiction--History
Completed: 27 January 2019
Summary & Review:
Once the fighting of World War II was over, another battle began: the hunt to find the Nazi leaders who perpetrated the Holocaust and bring them to justice. In this book, Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard relate the stories behind the capture of several top Nazis after the end of the war.
There were a lot of things I didn't like about this book. First of all, it was written in a strange, passive style that just seemed a tad overwrought. Second, there just didn't seem to be that much excitement behind the true stories, but that didn't stop the authors from acting like it was a cliff-hanger-filled thriller novel. For example, the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the hunt that made up the majority of the book, basically boiled down to a bunch of young, healthy, strong men grabbing an elderly Nazi on a dirt road in a third world country and shoving him in the back of a car and then shoving him in the back of an airplane. Nothing went wrong, nothing exciting happened. They just jumped an old man and flew him to Israel to execute him. Yep. Thrilling!
The authors also seemed to see no other side to the war, Germany's descent into Nazism, Israeli revenge, etc than Israel's side. They thought it was an unqualified good that Israel and other Jewish figures repeatedly broke international law to find often low ranking Nazi party members sometimes to kidnap them, other times to just execute them. Also, O'Reilly and Dugard presented all the Nazi hunters as unblemished heroes, despite mentioning aspects about several of them that are pretty sketchy. For example, one of the "Nazi hunters" was funded by communist East Germany to embarrass West Germany. Um, last I checked, the body count of Communism was tens of millions more than Nazism. Actually, quite a few of the "good guys" in this book were avowed communists. To me, being an ardent communist is at least as bad as being a Nazi, if not worse. The famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal repeatedly lied about his experiences during the war and even lied about how many and which camps he survived.
And what about the bad guys? One of the Nazis they focused on was a 20 year old girl when she worked at one of the concentration camps in Germany. After the war she moved to the United States, married a Jewish man, and spent her life by all accounts being a kind, considerate person. Despite the fact that there was no evidence she ever committed any atrocities, only that she was a guard at a camp, the authors acted like her deportation and public shaming that occurred when she was an elderly woman were an unqualified good.
Living in Germany gave me a new perspective about what happened during the Second World War. The way most people see it, Germans were evil, pure and simple, and that's why they became Nazis. They simply wanted to murder Jews. I don't believe that. Germans seem to have a culture that deeply values following rules, structure, order, etc. The defense that many Nazis gave during their various trials, i.e. "I was only following orders," makes a lot of sense when you get to know German people. They do follow orders, almost unquestioningly. Yes, because of that culture a lot of low ranking Nazis did a lot of bad things, but for us to sit and judge them so severely is quite unfair.
Also, how would you act if you knew that if you didn't follow orders you'd be killed? Or your family would be? Why was Nazism appealing to so many? What factors caused so many to turn to this movement? The authors don't even attempt to give any insight into these people. They present them as one dimensional villains, from the highest ranking Nazis like Himmler all the way down the line to the lowest ranking nobody.
Rating: 4.0
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