MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWith the skills of a gifted historian and a highly regarded international criminal lawyer, Sands tells the story of Horst Wächter struggling to come to terms with his father’s past as a Nazi war criminal ... Sands’s ability to tease out Horst’s emotional, and often contradictory, views of his father as an indicted war criminal is fascinating. It’s abundantly clear that Sands and Horst created a bond of trust over their years of friendship. No doubt this relationship was a catalyzing factor in Sands’s desire to explore deeper the entangled pathways of the Wächter family ... But the story line of a son trying to reconcile love for his father with the difficult facts of history is not sufficiently compelling to sustain the entire book. Neither is it new nor surprising...This may be why Sands includes other story lines in his book. However, they read as divergent threads that do not always work. For example, Sands spends considerable time pursuing a theory, advanced by Horst, that Otto did not succumb to a severe illness but was assassinated. Sands’s detective work on this point, which includes extensive interviews, travel, and research, is impressive but ultimately unsatisfactory. Early on, it’s apparent that the assassination theory has little merit. More importantly, I was never convinced that it was a central theme of the story ... The author also touches on the reference in the book’s title — The Ratline — but here too, the tangent is superficial ... opens a window into the complex narrative of collective responsibility, including how to come to terms with those who move in the protracted shadow of evil. In today’s toxic political environment, it is a concept worth reexamining.
