A solid portrait of the iconic Nazi.
A new biography of the man who “did as much to save Jews and other prisoners from Nazi death camps as Oskar Schindler.”
Prolific historian Johnson, author of The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln and Decided on the Battlefield, recounts how Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945), Hitler’s chief of intelligence, grew to despise his boss and attempted to warn the Allies of his plans and, with some success, mislead him. Enlisting in the German navy in 1905, Canaris impressed superiors and became an intelligence officer at the onset of World War I. He served with distinction and remained in the shrunken navy after 1918. Fiercely nationalistic and conservative, he hated the Weimar Republic, cheered the Nazi takeover, and was appointed chief of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, in 1935. Johnson fares no better than other scholars in explaining why Canaris turned against Hitler after a few years. Many Nazi officials disliked him, but Canaris was among the few who took action. Through smuggled papers and leaks, he regularly informed the Allies of Hitler’s plans. Sadly, they were generally dismissed as misinformation. Hitler grew to take a dim view of his discouraging intelligence. Perhaps Canaris’ greatest achievement was convincing Spanish dictator Franco to refuse Hitler permission to march Nazi troops through Spain to capture British Gibraltar. More than most biographers, Johnson recounts his subject’s rescue of hundreds of Jews by ordering their release from concentration camps, smuggling them out of the country, and even sending them abroad as Abwehr agents. It turns out that rescuing Jews was a minor industry among Nazi officials, especially if they were influential or had friends among them, but Canaris stands out. A suspicious Hitler dismissed him in 1944, and he was executed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, although he was probably not involved.
A solid portrait of the iconic Nazi.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781633889989
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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