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The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive Audiobook
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"Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." --John le Carré From the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning 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 Wächter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948 . . . Philippe Sands pieces together, in riveting detail, Wächter's extraordinary, shocking story. Given full access to the Wächter family archives--journals, diaries, tapes, and more--and with the assistance of the Wächters' son Horst, who believes his father to have been a "good man," Sands writes of Wächter's rise through the Nazi high command, his "blissful" marriage and family life as their world was brought to ruin, and his four-year flight to escape justice--to the Tirol, to Rome, and the Vatican; given a new identity, on his way to a new life via "the Ratline" to Perón's Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and thousands of other Nazis. Wächter's escape was 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 Americans and the U.S. Army 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 discovery, told up-close through access to a trove of family correspondence between Wächter and his wife--part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, part Cold War espionage thriller. "Breathtaking, gripping, shattering." --Elif Shafak
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About Philippe Sands
Philippe Sands is professor of law at University College London and a practicing barrister at Matrix Chambers. He frequently appears before international courts, including the International Criminal Court and the World Court in the Hague, and has been involved in many of the most important cases of recent years, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, and Guantanamo. His previous books include Lawless World and Torture Team. He is a frequent contributor to the London Financial Times, the Guardian, New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair, makes regular appearances on radio and television, and serves on the boards of English PEN and the Hay Festival.
About Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry is an award-winning comedian, actor, presenter, and director. He rose to fame alongside Hugh Laurie in A Bit of Fry and Laurie (which he cowrote with Laurie) and Jeeves and Wooster and was unforgettable as General Melchett in Blackadder. He hosted over 180 episodes of QI and has narrated all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the audiobook recordings. In addition to his Greek Myths series, he is the bestselling author of The Ode Less Travelled, Fry’s Ties, four novels (Revenge, Making History, The Hippopotamus, and The Liar), and three volumes of autobiography (Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, and More Fool Me).