Join us on Tuesday, March 23rd at 11am for a virtual event.  DIESEL, A Bookstore, and The Righteous Conversations Project at IKAR, a Jewish spiritual community standing at the intersection of spirituality and social justice, are proud to present Philippe Sands in conversation with Marla Stone as they discuss The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive.

Baron Otto von Wächter was an Austrian lawyer, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, and creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto which led to his indictment as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles.  After the war, he was hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, and by Simon Wiesenthal, and was on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948, until his mysterious death.

Philippe Sands pieces together, in riveting detail, Wächter’s extraordinary, shocking story. Given full access to the Wächter family archives – journals, diaries, tapes, and more – and with the assistance of the Wächters’ son Horst, who believes his father to have been a “good man,” Sands writes of Wächter’s rise through the Nazi high command, his “blissful” marriage and family life as their world was brought to ruin, and his four-year flight to escape justice – to the Tirol, to Rome, and to the Vatican.  After being given a new identity, he was on his way to a new life via “the Ratline” to Perón’s Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and thousands of other Nazis. Wächter’s escape was cut short by his mysterious, shocking death in Rome, in the midst of the burgeoning Cold War (was he being recruited in postwar Italy by the Americans and the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps or by the Soviet NKVD or by both?)

An extraordinary discovery, told up-close through access to a trove of family correspondence between Wächter and his wife – part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, part Cold War espionage thriller.

Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and, since 2018, the president of English PEN. He is a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC World Service. In 2003 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel. He lives in London.

Marla Stone is professor of History at Occidental College. A historian of twentieth century Europe, her scholarship focuses on fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide. Professor Stone is the author and editor of a number of books, including The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy, When the Wall Came Down, and The Fascist Revolution. The author of numerous articles, anthology essays, and book chapters, Professor Stone’s work has appeared in The Journal of Modern Italian Studies, The Journal of Contemporary History, Constellations, The New England Journal of History, and The Journal of Hate Studies. Professor Stone has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the European University Institute, Florence. She is currently at work on The Enemy: The Politics and Propaganda of Anti-communism in Italy which analyzes anti-communism in Italy from Fascism through Christian Democracy, its impact on Italian politics and the implications for democracy of a mobilization of fear and hatred toward an internal and external political enemy.  Professor Stone is Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Foundation of Southern California and President of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.

Philippe Sands in conversation with Marla Stone discusses "The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive"