Reigniting the history nerd in me

During a 10-week work break in 2023 I had the opportunity to read more than usual. I used my time to delve into some biographical and historical accounts of WW2 and its aftermath. This period in history holds a special interest for me, largely due to my ongoing desire to understand human behaviour and how people deal with unfathomable situations. I don't usually read non-fiction as I prefer the escapism of fiction. There's enough reality in front of me, particularly with so much access to information about current and past world events at our fingertips. I have studied history at university, though, and still have a thirst for knowledge about the past and the people who lived through it.

The four books I read during my work break are each fascinating in their own right. They taught me a lot of things I didn't know that both captured my interest and broke my heart. I read dark and disturbing fiction all the time, but reading about real people doing terrible things is so much worse.

Come to this court and cry | Linda Kinstler | Published August 2022

This book explores the lesser known genocidal crimes against Latvian Jews in WW2. It delves into the case of Arajs Commando leader, Herbert Cukurs, known as the Butcher of Riga. Author Linda Kinstler's interest in the Cukurs case, the only reported post-war Nazi war criminal killing without trial, is personal. Kinstler discovers during in her research that her grandfather, Boris Kinstlers, served in Cukurs's killing unit and was thought to have been a double agent for the KGB before he disappeared in 1949. Cukurs was killed by the Mossad in Uruguay five years after the capture (in Buenos Aires), extradition, trial and hanging of Adolf Eichmann in 1960. It is thought that the Mossad killed Cukurs without trial to deter West Germany from ending the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. The title of the book comes from the pages the assassins left with Cukurs's corpse from the closing speech of the Chief British Prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials:

After this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!’

Kinstler's account is absolutely fascinating. It charts Cukurs's early life as a hero pilot and then as a killer in the genocide of Latvian Jews, the circumstances of his murder, and subsequent attempts to rehabilitate his image. It is also deeply disturbing, and not just for the retelling of the horrors of the murder of thousands of Latvian Jews. It is disturbing in its exploration of historical revisionism and in its portrayal of the limitations of justice. Sadly, the books shows how history can become distorted as time marches on, and the guilty are often heartbreakingly reprieved.

Come to this court and cry is a moving and intelligent exploration of the Cukurs story told from a legal perspective. It is tragic to read about how many documents and other evidence of the Holocaust have been destroyed. Survivor testimonies should hold weight, but so often they do not. Not everyone is willing to speak about their experiences, and the law tends to treats them as unreliable. It's sad to know now that we have so few survivors left to tell their stories so their 'evidence' becomes enmeshed with revisionist and nationalist moves to obliterate guilt and allow war criminals to escape punishment, even posthumously.

Kinstler does not find out the full story of her grandfather but she knows enough to understand that he probably participated in killing Latvian Jews, a burden for her to bear, particularly given that the maternal side of her family is Jewish.

Kinstler does not come to any real conclusions nor offer hope for the future. She instead leaves the reader thinking about the role and nature of evidence in determining justice (the antonym for forgetting, as Kinstler suggests, rather than remembering) and how evidence is treated differently in legal and historical domains.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Aftermath: Life in the fallout of the Third Reich 1945-1955 | Harald Jahner | Published January 2019

My main reason for reading Aftermath was to add to my knowledge of life in Germany in the immediate post-war years. I've always been fascinated to understand how as a nation, Germany dealt with guilt and complicity, and what it must have been like to have been a Jewish survivor in Europe. The book I read is interesting but it is focussed on the aftermath of the war and less on the aftermath of the Holocaust. As Jahner points out, the absence of discussion in his book of the Holocaust is in itself telling. It took many years for the genocide committed during WW2 to be addressed. What happened to the victims is hardly mentioned in the book.

Jahner writes of the suffering of the German people, whose cities had been reduced to rubble. Food and supplies were scarce so black markets flourished and millions of displaced persons needed to reintegrate as borders shifted and Europe had to move forward. There is a lot of interesting information about the rebuilding of Germany in the book, however what I took away from it is that denazification was a 'compromise' by the Allies to get on with the task of helping Germany back on its feet. This truth saddened me even though I understand how much Germany did suffer. I found it jarring to read about how many Germans wanted to believe they were victims of Hitler's regime and seemed oblivious to the suffering of Holocaust victims. This relativist victimhood is only dealt with in the last two chapters and I wish there had been more. That said, history tells us that it wasn't until the 1960s that children of the war generation questioned their parents' activities during the war. The book only covers the period 1945-1955. Perhaps the message is that the genocide perpetrated by a regime that Germans voted in was too much to deal with at the time?

I gave the book 3 stars, not because it isn't a well researched, intelligent, interesting and compelling read, but because I was looking for more about guilt and complicity. It would be interesting to see how the switch happened, from apparent loyalty to the Nazi regime to the new Germany that grew out of the war in that early post-war period.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

The SS Officer's armchair | Daniel Lee | Published June 2020

Daniel Lee, a British Jewish WW2 historian, stumbles by chance on a set of documents found hidden in the cushion of an armchair that is being reupholstered in Amsterdam. Gaining access to these documents sends Dr Lee on a historical detective journey. The documents (and the chair) originate from Prague, and once belonged to Dr Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart who joined the SS and worked in an administrative position during the war for the Reich's Ministry of Economics and Labour. Lee embarks on what he describes as a backwards historical journey, starting with evidence and trying to piece together the story, rather than the other way around.

I enjoyed reading Lee's work as I am fascinated by the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinarily bad things. I was interested to see how he put all the pieces together. Griesinger belongs to the group of 'desk perpetrators' of the Holocaust who didn't personally murder anyone but whose administrative work sent millions to their deaths. Griesinger himself is forgettable, one of the low-level perpetrators of Nazi ideology consigned to the ranks of the infamous, nameless masses. What is interesting about Griesinger's story is that his greed and ambition did not equate with his actual abilities. He used the Nazi regime to further his career, deluded into thinking that someone or something else was to blame for his shortcomings and lack of success. Lee was unable to uncover much about Griesinger's political beliefs, unfortunately, so the reader is left with the unproven assumption that it was ambition not anti-semitism that drove Griesinger's acts during the war.

Lee's research journey is fascinating and I can see parallels with Kinstler's book on the Herberts Cukurs case in Latvia. Lee also struggled to find evidence. Griesinger's family seemed to know little of his wartime experiences and Lee found that people were unwilling to talk to him. My only criticism of the book (as other reviewers have pointed out, too) is that some of what Lee writes is assumption and conjecture. His book could be strengthened by exploring lack of evidence, the difficulty of obtaining survivor testimonies, and the lens through which the family viewed their relative. The book could be a solid testament to the role and nature of evidence, as is Kinstler's book, and the issues of guilt and complicity and how they have been dealt with since the end of the war.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Agent Sonya | Ben Macintyre | Published September 2020

Agent Sonya is the biography of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jewish communist activist who became a Soviet spy in the 1930s and 1940s, eventually gathering information from her cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside to help the Soviets build an atom bomb. Ursula continued her espionage activities after the war's end, eventually shifting gears completely and reframing herself as a children's writer. She lived to a ripe old age in East Berlin, the master of reinvention.

Ursula's story is fascinating, from her early years as a communist activist to her espionage activities in China, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, and England. She survived Stalin's ruthless Great Purge despite being a colonel in the Red Army. She also survived the Nazi regime and managed to foil British and American intelligence agencies, largely due to her gender. Ursula cast herself as an ordinary wife and mother, and sexist attitudes of the time allowed her to pretty much fly under the radar. How fascinating that her seemingly boring existence as a wife and mother formed the perfect camouflage!

Ursula exploited the sexism and patriarchy of the time and used it to her advantage. Whatever your political beliefs, it's hard not to admire Ursula's cunning, her commitment, intelligence, and resilience. She successfully managed to be a spy and juggle those activities with parenting and multiple lovers and husbands.

Ben Macintyre has written a gripping and well researched account of Ursula's life, with access to her diaries and correspondence. I thought he did a stellar job of describing Ursula's exploits and the incredible dangers she faced, while helping the reader understand her beliefs and personality. He made Ursula seem sympathetic. That's a tough ask, given the things Ursula did and her sometimes cold responses to events in her sphere (such as the deaths of comrades or the life she forced onto her children).

The things that Ursula did across her espionage career would be hard to believe if this was a work of fiction, but it's not! Ursula remained true to her convictions, never betraying her comrades and herself never betrayed, showing how strongly she inspired loyalty from others. It's amazing to think, too, that Ursula kept her activities from her three children who had no idea what she was up to until later in their lives.

I also found the book to be deeply sad. Ursula had courage and conviction but she was idealistic and naïve in many ways. She was driven by a sense of justice for the wrongs she saw being wrought on the masses from her position of privilege. She turned to communism as way to ensure equality for all. It was hard for her to face the realities of communism through her war experiences, but she remained a supporter of its central tenets. Her children, especially her oldest child Michael, led a nomadic existence, living in multiple countries in their early years, learning several languages and dealing with the periodic absences of their parents. One of her children didn't even know who her father was until later in life. (Side note: All three children had different fathers.) Ursula recruited her first husband (Michael's father) into the spy game but he was rubbish at it and ended up spending years starved and beaten in a Soviet gulag.

The book is intense and full of political descriptions and a huge cast of characters. As a student of history, I'm used to that so I didn't find the book as heavy going as other reviews I've read. I would agree with other reviewers who've said Macintyre writes non-fiction like fiction so don't be put off by the subject matter as the book is quite readable.

I would like to have learnt more about Ursula's later life in East Berlin and also more from her children about how they felt about their upbringing and finding out their mother was a spy. There is some interesting detail at the end of the book about where the key players ended up, but I would have liked more of it. Other than that, I found the book compelling and an interesting source to add to my knowledge of the 1930s and 1940s.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Tea with Hitler: The secret history of the royal family and the Third Reich | Dean Palmer | Published April 2021

Tea with Hitler is a fascinating look at the not-so-secret connections between the British royal family and the Nazi regime, from links forged during the interwar years among royals and their Germanic cousins. American forces in Germany later found documents that exposed just how strong those links were. King George VI, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt colluded to keep the papers secret to avoid a public relations disaster so soon after the end of WW2. This was in effect a whitewashing of history to protect the royal family. Three of Philip Mountbatten's sisters were banned from Westminster Abbey and the wedding of their brother to Princess Elizabeth because their husbands were senior Nazi officers.

I found Tea with Hitler interesting and informative. There's a good deal of the book dedicated to the Queen Victoria's attempts to weave British and German royal houses together, but I quite liked reading all that history. The book is really more about the shattering of the Queen's dynastic ambitions than anything else.

I had some knowledge of sympathies of British royals towards Hitler - and we all know the story of Edward and Wallis Simpson - but not the extent of it. I was both shocked and unsurprised. I am in no way shape or form a monarchist but I still find royalty fascinating. Reading Tea with Hitler only reinforced my view that British royals are rather an unpleasant band of privileged folk who seem to think they can do as they please.

The writing style in Tea with Hitler is a bit gossipy and feels like it was written to entertain. I've seen other reviewers comment on the poor editing, too. Those things make the book an easier read than the other historic tomes reviewed in this post but I am not sure how much of the book is accurate. Dean Palmer is a television historian so that might explain the writing. I just went along for the ride but would like to read something better researched and written to expand my knowledge.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐