Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld

Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, 454 pages.

Serge Klarsfeld was a French Jew whose last memory of his father was of when he was eight, when the Germans came and his father hid Serge, his mother, and sister in a hidden cupboard under the sink. Beate was a German girl whose father fought on the eastern front. He was saved from death in battle by a case of double pneumonia in 1945. Beatte and Serge met in Paris in 1960. They have been together ever since, married with children and now grandchildren. They have spent their lives chasing down Nazis who had escaped justice after the war.  Some of the men they hunted worked in the post-war German government, like Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger, or in the European parliament like Ernst Achenbach. Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, was hiding in Bolivia.
Beate and Serge fought tirelessly to bring former Nazis to justice, using legal and illegal methods, working with allies from the revered Simon Wiesenthal to the more infamous Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader.
This was my introduction to the famous pair. I had somehow missed the 1986 made-for-TV movie, starring Farah Fawcett, made about the couple.

Ratlines by Stuart Neville

Ratlines by Stuart Neville, 354 pages.

Albert Ryan, was a soldier in the British Army during WWII, has left the Army by 1963, and now works for the Intelligence services. After several Breton and Nazi refugees living in Ireland are murdered, Ryan is called in to investigate. SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny, an actual former Nazi, is borrowed from real lif to be a character in this novel. He gets to play the irredeemably evil villan. He does it well, plotting against, stealing from, and torturing other characters as the book progresses. Ryan, a character caring the baggage of being a Protestant in a Catholic Land, is also looked on with suspicion for his serving in the British Army while many of his countrymen were not just neutral, but wishing to work with the Axis. Its a book that is well set in its time and place, with enough complications to keep it moving along smartly. Neville tends to let the violence get a bit graphic, and it may not be for the squeamish reader, but it is a very well done thriller.

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