“The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945”, by Gerald Reitlinger

502 pages, Arms & Armour Press, ISBN-13: 978-0853681878

The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945 is author Gerald Reitlinger’s thorough and authoritative history of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron) and its growth from a small paramilitary formation designed to protect the Nazi leadership at rallies to one of the most powerful organizations in Germany. From 1929 until the regime’s collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance and terror within Germany and German-occupied Europe. Reitlinger records its foundation as a police guard of about two-hundred members, to its development and growth over a decade later into a force of a half-million with a wide diversity of functions, and (thank God) its ultimate destruction of what had morphed into a vast criminal enterprise. Ultimately, the SS would possess its own military divisions in the field, the ubiquitous Gestapo offices across the Reich, and about a dozen Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) in Poland; this was in addition to such projects as “Germanic” archaeology, the cultivation of wild rubber roots and medicinal herbs, and the control of several nightclubs. In the end, the SS was an example of bureaucracy gone mad (if you are not amazed at how this kraken-like monstrosity seized hold of every police and civil branch within an increasingly-menacing police state then lord help ya).

Be careful with the first 20% or so of the book, as these German names and their relationships to one another can get pretty confusin’, but stick with it as ultimately these nefarious actors become more well-defined as every conversation or statement from the main characters is routinely cited from firsthand accounts; helpfully, the book includes an extensive bibliography and biographies of dozens of characters in the upper echelons of the Nazi military, SS and civil bureaucracy. Reitlinger weaves a remarkable tapestry of names, places and events in order to give the reader a better understanding of the inner workings of the Nazi government, their secret orders to exterminating the Jews, Slavs and other Untermenschen (sub-human) races, the often public denials of the concentration camps by members of the highest rank, the contests for power under Hitler, and the seductions and betrayals between officers and agents at the heart of the German Reich.

But Alibi of a Nation is so much more than a history of the SS; it is also – maybe even primarily – an especially brilliant piece of political analysis and a full-scale attack upon a popular fraud perpetuated by the inheritors of Germany. The fraud Reitlinger mercilessly scorches is the idea that the SS concealed its operations from the political and military leaders, a fraud that has been assiduously propagated since the downfall of Hitler to enable Germans to deny their knowledge of – and, hence complicity in – the SS atrocities. His major effort goes into demonstrating the role of the SS at the top levels of Nazi policy and administration and in their role of “Working Towards the Führer”. In reality, the book concerns Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Karl Dönitz and the conflicts and pressures and manipulations and murder plots within the Party hierarchy. If the structure and activities of the SS (there is a lengthy, almost unbearable section on the death camps) are carefully expounded, the SS is seem primarily as an instrument and embodiment of the inner political and personal views of the total Nazi regime.

Reitlinger has written an important scholarly addition to any library, a bleak book that details the most insidious plots and conversations among some of history’s most brutal mass murderers, the corruption of their officers, and the incredible processes of armies within armies, states within the states, and secret intelligence forces within the police and other ministries.

“The Times Atlas of World History”, edited by Geoffrey Barraclough

360 pages, Hammond, ISBN-13: 978-0843711257

The Times Atlas of World History is an historical atlas first published by Times Books Limited (then a subsidiary of Times Newspapers, Ltd., and later a branch of Collins Bartholomew, which is a subsidiary of HarperCollins, and which in the latest editions has changed names to become The Times Complete History of the World; and I thought bank mergers were ridiculous). The first two editions were created by Barry Winkleman, the editorial director of Times Atlases and Managing Director of Times Books, and were edited by the Oxford Chichele Professor of Modern History Geoffrey Barraclough. It is divided into seven sections:

• The world of early man 
• The first civilizations
•  The classical civilizations of Eurasia 
• The world of divided regions 
• The world of emerging West 
• The age of European dominance 
• The age of global civilization

The book is prefaced with an eleven page World Chronology which is quick-view timeline across general geographic regions. It is suffixed with a Glossary (38 pages), helpful in cross-referencing names and places, and an index (26 pages). Each section is further divided into given subjects and contain between one and nine maps, charts to show economic, demographic, manufactures, agricultural output, drug trade and other data as needed. Occasionally illustrations are included on a topic. In the introduction to the first edition, Geoffrey Barraclough notes that the desire of The Atlas was to provide a history based on the viewpoint of its creators, hence the spread of Islam, for example, is centered at Mecca, as might have been the view of the 7^th Century Arabs.

“‘Unsinkable’: The Full Story of RMS Titanic”, by Daniel Allen Butler

304 pages, Stackpole Books, ISBN-13: 978-0811718141

The story of the sinking of the RMS Titanic is almost too classically Hollywood to be believable: one of the most luxurious ocean liners of all time, billed as “unsinkable”, strikes an iceberg and sinks, resulting in the highest casualties of its time (prior to the sinking of the Titanic, the grand total of deaths on an ocean liner in the past forty years was six people) with poor people trapped below as the ship sinks, families saying tearful goodbyes at the lifeboats, and musicians playing even as the ship goes under? If it didn’t actually happen you’d think it was a bad, maudlin script and throw it in the circular file. But happen it did, and in “Unsinkable”: The Full Story of RMS Titanic by Daniel Allen Butler we have purports to be just that: the tale of the Titanic, from start to finish. Butler gives us some background into the building of the Titanic and some general stats about the ship, but he wastes no time getting to the good stuff (the night of the sinking occurs on page 63), and Butler goes into almost exhausting detail covering almost every moment of the ship’s final hours…

…only, if you’ve ever read A Night to Remember by Walter Lord well, then, then you’ve read Unsinkable, too. The author tries to present himself as an original researcher who has painstakingly recreated the disaster for readers to immerse themselves in and, yes, he does put some interesting tidbits in (he’s one of the few Titanic authors who claims the last song the heroic band played was “Nearer, My God, to Thee”). But there is very little new under the sun, or in Unsinkable, and Walter Lord did it first. Oh, Butler discusses the crew’s response as well as the experiences of multiple passengers, from first class to steerage, and examining several myths about the treatment of the third class passengers once the ship started to sink.  It’s true that there were gates keeping the third class passengers from the rest of the ship, Butler says, but this was an immigration regulation and most of those gates were unlocked when the ship began to sink. It is in this replay of the Titanic story is best as it places the tragedy in the context of the social setting: “the men and women aboard the Titanic demonstrated almost every derogatory characteristic of Edwardian society: arrogance, pride, snobbery, prejudice, racism, chauvinism, and maudlin sentimentality. They also showed in equal measure the Edwardians’ capacity for self-confidence, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, gallantry, noblesse oblige, and devotion to duty”.

Another interesting fact that Unsinkable unearths is how the battle cry of “women and children first” affected the women’s suffrage movement: you see, “…the sad truth for the women’s suffrage movement was that, as Mrs. John Martin of the League for the Civic Education of Women put it, ‘We are willing to let men die for us, but we aren’t willing to let them vote for us.’ She was merely underscoring the basic hypocrisy of the suffrage movement of the early 20^th Century, a hypocrisy that the Titanic exposed and that the suffragettes had not considered: equality of rights also entailed equality of risk. The suffragettes lost much of their credibility as a result, as too many of their number, unlike the women of sixty years later, were eager to secure rights without accepting responsibility”. This was a fact I hadn’t considered, but is one that is inforce today: after all, how many feminists truly believe in equality of opportunity and equality of risk? The only good thing to come out of the Titanic sinking was that it illustrated how dangerously out of date the safety regulations on ships were. After he finishes covering the sinking and the rescue of the passengers, Butler spends several chapters discussing the numerous investigations and inquests that followed the sinking. The sinking was the direct cause of massive reforms on ocean liners, improving everything from the radio technicians shifts to the number of required lifeboats. The Titanic was a horrifying tragedy, Butler argues, but it was a tragedy that could have been avoided numerous different ways, and because of the sinking, ocean travel became safer for future passengers.

With every tragedy that befalls us it is fashionable to say that “the world is changed forever”. Well, with the sinking of the Titanic…the world changed forever: it signified the beginning of end of an era, not just the Edwardian age, but the end of the rigidly stratified class structure with its built-in inequities (it would take the first World War to truly bury it). Also, the hubris of technology suffered a blow; we were never so innocent again as to place our belief in “unsinkable” ships, or the infallibility of any work of man. For all of its appropriations, Unsinkable tells its tale of human hubris and short-sightedness well, and all in one slim easy-to-read volume, to boot…

…OH! I almost forgot to quote my favorite line in the entire book: “[Astor] had even written a science fiction novel, A Journey Into Other Worlds, whose hero, Colonel Bearwarden, was contracted by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company to make the Earth’s axis perfectly vertical, creating perpetual springtime.” Who knew Astor could channel Douglas Adams 40 years before his birth? And I want to read that book.

“Beethoven: The Composer as Hero”, by Philippe Autexier

144 pages, Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500300060

I have been a Beethoven aficionado since age 15 when my parents bought me an audio cassette box-set featuring all of his symphonies. Since then I have updated them – first to CD and then to my iPod – and have done my damndest to collect all of his music and to learn all that I could about dear old Ludwig van. This book, Beethoven: The Composer as Hero by Philippe Autexier isn’t bad at all, but at 144 pages it’s about as brief as brief can be. It is well-written, with Beethoven’s life chronicled from birth to deafness to death and everything else in-between. And there is a morsel or two about Beethoven that you may not get from grander, more scholarly works, such as the little tidbit that once when Ludwig van was walking in the woods with Ferdinand Ries (a composer, friend, pupil and secretary to Beethoven) and humming a tune out loud…that turned out to be the Third Movement to his Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, known better as the Appassionata. But this isn’t why you buy a book such as this, for every page has several photographs, most of them in color, and it is printed on some damn fine paper, to boot; it is rather nice having color portraits of the people in Beethoven’s life, such as his grandfather and other members of his family, or Muzio Clementi, Joseph Haydn, Rodolphe Kreutzer and Antonio Salieri, as well as many of his benefactors and other personal friends (not to mention street scenes, scenes of Beethoven playing the piano as a mesmerized audience looks on, scenes from Fidelio, etc.). Not a bad little book at all; just more of a primer on the great man than a proper biography.