Jan 03, 2019
If you weren't a Neil Bascomb fan
before reading this book, you will be afterward. This is my third Bascomb book
in the last 2 weeks and it is vintage Bascomb: detailed meticulous research,
novel quality character building, excellent diagrams and photos and riveting
suspenseful plot timelines . He even includes the passport photo of Eichmann
under his assumed name. Neil Bascomb's historical non fiction books read more
like action novels and this book is no exception. It is the story of one of
history's most evil murderers, Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi chosen to carryout the
Final Solution to rid Germany and Europe of all the Jews. It is a story of
deception, cruelty and enslavement and extermination of almost 6 million Jews
by Hitler's Third Reich under the aegis and authority of Exterminator in Chief,
Colonel Adolph Eichmann. The book follows the secretive henchman from his
humble beginnings to organizing the "Final Solution" to his clever
escapes after the war finally to his ugly bunker shaped concrete house in the
small town of San Fernando south of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's a story of:
you can run but you can't hide, and the book chronicles the efforts of a
variety of Nazi hunters tracking down the worst of the worst, many of whom
landed in friendly despotic and protective South American countries at the end
of the war with the aid of organizations like the Vatican and the Catholic
Church..
Eichmann might have died in obscurity in Argentina like many other prominent Nazis . He was secretive and fiendishly clever covering his tracks but he had a son, Nick Eichmann, who shared his dad's anti Semitic views and couldn't keep his mouth shut. He briefly dated a young Argentine woman named Sylvia Hermann and had bragged about his father who had an important job in Nazi Germany. Nick Eichmann gloried in the annihilation of the Jews. This disturbed Sylvia whose own father was half Jewish. Amazingly and inexplicably, after Adolf brought his family to join him in Argentina, he allowed them to keep the Eichmann name even though he had changed his name to Ricardo Klement. This proved his undoing. The story progresses with the Israeli Mossad pursuing leads and dead ends until they finally located Ricardo Klement in a hovel on a barren plot without electricity or running water. The bulk of the story is how a small group of Jews and Israelis mounted a difficult and dangerous kidnapping of Eichmann behind enemy lines in Nazi friendly Argentina. The kidnapping succeeded and Eichmann was tried , convicted and hanged in Israel and the agents responsible disappeared into woodwork for decades, keeping their secret. Near the end of their lives the details emerged and Bascomb and his helpers have done a masterful job uncovering those details. The book is full of surprising anecdotes. For example the El Al flight to retrieve Eichmann descended out of the clouds on approach to the Buenos Aires Airport and almost crashed into a hill because the navigator was using feet as was the rest of the aviation world but Argentina was still using meters. There are many such stories adding suspense to the capture and Bascomb does a good job weaving them into his narrative. If there is anything lacking in the narrative I think it was the failure of Neil Bascomb to explain even briefly the basis for the extermination of all non Aryans, He dealt solely with the Jewish Holocaust and doesn't mention that millions of other" untermenschen"(inferior peoples) in Germany and occupied countries had their own Holocaust. This included homosexuals, gypsies, mentally and physically disabled, Slavs, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Romanians Poles, blacks and many others who didn't meet their racially perfect criteria and were also slaughtered. But on the other hand it is hard to imagine a super secret Gypsy intelligence operation with the resources and operational skills powerful enough to track down mass killers all over the world to match the Mossad. I would like to mention that as a child I vividly remember this capture of Eichmann and it was the entire spectacle that brought home to me and the world the evil wrought by the Nazis extermination of the untermenschen now known as the Holocaust.
Here is my review of The Winter Fortress, a masterpiece of sabotage.....
Neil Bascomb has done it again with The Winter Fortress, a superbly researched tale of the epic attack and escape of a group of Norwegian saboteurs upon the Vermork hydro electric facility in central Norway during WW2. As a bit of a war buff I had stumbled upon The Escape Artists written by Bascomb telling the tale of a great escape by a group of RAF fliers from a german prison in WW1. I was hooked on Neil Bascomb after that and hoped this book would be its equal. It was even better because this sabotage was world shaking in its importance. Vermork's significance lay in its generation of "heavy water", Deuterium, one of the isotopes of water which at the time was one of the paths to building a nuclear bomb. Nazi Germany was following down that path in a frantic attempt to build one to win the war. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) in England , the new Intelligence organization, was well aware of Germany's research program and mounted a sustained effort to stop this program at all costs. This included training native Norwegian in the dark arts of sabotage, evasion and escape and launching preemptive strikes on Vermork from the air which failed miserably and drove the Germans to make it an impregnable fortress. Neil Bascomb turns the sabotage attempt by a courageous band of Norwegians into a riveting Mission Impossible tale. Bascomb does a marvelous job with character development of the saboteurs and the German scientists and provides detailed historical background of this period of the war in occupied Norway. Bascomb's trademark detailed maps and photos lend verisimilitude to the epic raid and escape. At the time the Allies did not know how close the Germans were to completion of their atomic bomb and the heavy water method of concentrating the uranium isotopes was not the method chosen by the American scientists over the pond at the Manhattan Project who were trying another method of centrifuge concentration. As it happened the Deuterium path was too slow and expensive to yield a valuable bomb for Germany in time to win the war but this was not known at the time and stopping the German Atomic Bomb program was of the highest priority. The author takes the reader on a wild at times almost cinematic ride as the courageous Norwegians launch their impossible task. This was my second Bascomb book and I am binge reading all of Bascomb's books in our wonderful Wyoming library. I urge you to do the same.
And here is a brief review of Neil Bascomb tale of a great escape near the end of WW 1....
Neil Bascomb has written a gripping account of the escape of a daring band of mostly RAF fliers from Holzminden prison in Germany near the end of WW1. Bascomb buiilds up to the escape by lending background to how the war started and stalled out, what military aviation was like in those early days and he delves deep into the personal characteristics and personalities of the principals involved. The actual escape is a page turner. Bascomb does a superb job of research and the pictures and maps and diagrams presented are a great help to appreciate the magnitude of their feat. I finished the book within a day of the 100th anniversary of the end of WW 1.
Eichmann might have died in obscurity in Argentina like many other prominent Nazis . He was secretive and fiendishly clever covering his tracks but he had a son, Nick Eichmann, who shared his dad's anti Semitic views and couldn't keep his mouth shut. He briefly dated a young Argentine woman named Sylvia Hermann and had bragged about his father who had an important job in Nazi Germany. Nick Eichmann gloried in the annihilation of the Jews. This disturbed Sylvia whose own father was half Jewish. Amazingly and inexplicably, after Adolf brought his family to join him in Argentina, he allowed them to keep the Eichmann name even though he had changed his name to Ricardo Klement. This proved his undoing. The story progresses with the Israeli Mossad pursuing leads and dead ends until they finally located Ricardo Klement in a hovel on a barren plot without electricity or running water. The bulk of the story is how a small group of Jews and Israelis mounted a difficult and dangerous kidnapping of Eichmann behind enemy lines in Nazi friendly Argentina. The kidnapping succeeded and Eichmann was tried , convicted and hanged in Israel and the agents responsible disappeared into woodwork for decades, keeping their secret. Near the end of their lives the details emerged and Bascomb and his helpers have done a masterful job uncovering those details. The book is full of surprising anecdotes. For example the El Al flight to retrieve Eichmann descended out of the clouds on approach to the Buenos Aires Airport and almost crashed into a hill because the navigator was using feet as was the rest of the aviation world but Argentina was still using meters. There are many such stories adding suspense to the capture and Bascomb does a good job weaving them into his narrative. If there is anything lacking in the narrative I think it was the failure of Neil Bascomb to explain even briefly the basis for the extermination of all non Aryans, He dealt solely with the Jewish Holocaust and doesn't mention that millions of other" untermenschen"(inferior peoples) in Germany and occupied countries had their own Holocaust. This included homosexuals, gypsies, mentally and physically disabled, Slavs, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Romanians Poles, blacks and many others who didn't meet their racially perfect criteria and were also slaughtered. But on the other hand it is hard to imagine a super secret Gypsy intelligence operation with the resources and operational skills powerful enough to track down mass killers all over the world to match the Mossad. I would like to mention that as a child I vividly remember this capture of Eichmann and it was the entire spectacle that brought home to me and the world the evil wrought by the Nazis extermination of the untermenschen now known as the Holocaust.
Here is my review of The Winter Fortress, a masterpiece of sabotage.....
Neil Bascomb has done it again with The Winter Fortress, a superbly researched tale of the epic attack and escape of a group of Norwegian saboteurs upon the Vermork hydro electric facility in central Norway during WW2. As a bit of a war buff I had stumbled upon The Escape Artists written by Bascomb telling the tale of a great escape by a group of RAF fliers from a german prison in WW1. I was hooked on Neil Bascomb after that and hoped this book would be its equal. It was even better because this sabotage was world shaking in its importance. Vermork's significance lay in its generation of "heavy water", Deuterium, one of the isotopes of water which at the time was one of the paths to building a nuclear bomb. Nazi Germany was following down that path in a frantic attempt to build one to win the war. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) in England , the new Intelligence organization, was well aware of Germany's research program and mounted a sustained effort to stop this program at all costs. This included training native Norwegian in the dark arts of sabotage, evasion and escape and launching preemptive strikes on Vermork from the air which failed miserably and drove the Germans to make it an impregnable fortress. Neil Bascomb turns the sabotage attempt by a courageous band of Norwegians into a riveting Mission Impossible tale. Bascomb does a marvelous job with character development of the saboteurs and the German scientists and provides detailed historical background of this period of the war in occupied Norway. Bascomb's trademark detailed maps and photos lend verisimilitude to the epic raid and escape. At the time the Allies did not know how close the Germans were to completion of their atomic bomb and the heavy water method of concentrating the uranium isotopes was not the method chosen by the American scientists over the pond at the Manhattan Project who were trying another method of centrifuge concentration. As it happened the Deuterium path was too slow and expensive to yield a valuable bomb for Germany in time to win the war but this was not known at the time and stopping the German Atomic Bomb program was of the highest priority. The author takes the reader on a wild at times almost cinematic ride as the courageous Norwegians launch their impossible task. This was my second Bascomb book and I am binge reading all of Bascomb's books in our wonderful Wyoming library. I urge you to do the same.
And here is a brief review of Neil Bascomb tale of a great escape near the end of WW 1....
Neil Bascomb has written a gripping account of the escape of a daring band of mostly RAF fliers from Holzminden prison in Germany near the end of WW1. Bascomb buiilds up to the escape by lending background to how the war started and stalled out, what military aviation was like in those early days and he delves deep into the personal characteristics and personalities of the principals involved. The actual escape is a page turner. Bascomb does a superb job of research and the pictures and maps and diagrams presented are a great help to appreciate the magnitude of their feat. I finished the book within a day of the 100th anniversary of the end of WW 1.
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