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The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands         {Reviewed by STELLA} Philippe Sands is an excellent historian. His book East West Street, an intensely personal and important book focusing on the township of Lemberg during the Third Reich, and on the origins of the atrocities that occurred there, won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016. In The Ratline, he is still searching for missing pieces. With the same forensic eye, the story of SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter, Nazi Governor of Galicia, is investigated. A fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, answerable directly to Himmler in a region where thousands of Jews and Poles perished, he was one who escaped the authorities and trial after the Second World War. This is the story of his disappearance, of his son Horst’s denial of his father as a bad man ( he prefers to see him as a good man entrenched in a terrible system)m and of the passionate, and often intensely difficult, relationship between Otto and his wife Charlotte. It is also about a friendship between two men that shouldn’t be possible. Sands likes Horst, a gentle and sensitive man still haunted by his father’s disappearance sixty years later, in spite of the obvious different perspectives and Horst’s inability to accept the truth of his father’s actions as an SS officer, and Philippe finds himself gravitating towards Horst, listening and attempting to understand his denial while enjoying his hospitality and genial nature. As Horst and Philippe meet over several years, discussing their connections with this place and its history, and as Horst reveals more to Philippe, allowing him access to the family archives (vast quantities of documents and letters collected and maintained by Charlotte) and slowly breaking with his sanitised view of the past, more secrets are revealed and the mystery of Otto’s death unpicked. When Poland fell to the Russian forces, Otto took to the mountains, on the run — a fugitive — for several years. He made it to Rome and had some protection from the church and past colleagues while waiting for an opportunity to escape Europe to join The Ratline — the journey many fascists were taking to Argentina and other South American countries that welcomed fleeing Nazis. Yet the circle was closing in. Delving into the family archive with forensic precision, his heartfelt conversations with Horst, documenting this family’s life during the Third Reich, at its fall and since, Sands has empathy for Horst in spite of the direct implications of Otto’s actions on his own Jewish family. Are we absolved of our individual actions by the wider ideologies we live under or partake in? Can future generations survive the trauma, and by consequence the guilt which arises from actions, of the past? Philippe Sands reveals to the reader in this compelling detective-style narrative the importance of telling the story and exposing the truth.