Word: crankshaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...compared to a subhuman being. Such is the case of Wolfgang Leonlard, an ex-Stalinist official of East Germany, whose dismal career has apparently foundered on the dismal hope that "national Communism" would be better than the all-too-togetherness of a universal Moscow state. Soviet Expert Edward Crankshaw met Leonhard in Yugoslavia, where, says Crankshaw in his foreword, "he was rather like one of those legendary young men who . . . emerge from the jungle emitting strange sounds, having spent their childhood or adolescence in the exclusive company of wolves-or bears...
...memoirs of statesmen and generals or the official regimental histories and the reminiscences of Panzer generals, are embedded the true nature of Naziism and the cause of World War II. Of the many valuable historical works that have drawn on these sources in recent years the latest is Edward Crankshaw's Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny, a chillingly felt, warmly told, and concise study of the main lever of Nazi power...
...authority on Soviet affairs, Journalist (London Observer) and Author (Cracks in the Kremlin Wall) Crankshaw has had ample occasion to study political terror. But when he turned from the Communists' MVD to the Nazis' Gestapo, he found a vast difference in attitudes. There was a mechanical ingenuity to Gestapo methods of torture (a small machine for crushing testicles), and a pseudo-scientific slant to many of their regular duties (victims with perfect teeth were withheld from the incinerators in order to provide the Nazis with perfect skulls for paperweights; the heads of dead Jewish Communist commissars were pickled...
...money or political advantages. In Poland and the Ukraine, where there were not enough tank ditches, and natural ravines were used to pack in the naked bodies of millions of massacred men, women and children, the SD Action Groups were full of self-pity for their exacting task. Crankshaw notes that volunteer groups from Lithuania and the Ukraine were only too ready to help out the SS, and he demolishes the argument that the Wehrmacht knew nothing of this hideous slaughter...
...Crankshaw provides vivid portraits of the top Gestapo men, in particular Himmler, whose mild, chinless exterior concealed a capable administrator, a ruthless intriguer, and the greatest mass murderer of all time. Towards the end of World War II, ambitious for absolute power, Himmler made the mistake of reaching out for just one more life. But that life was Hitler's; Himmler took potassium cyanide. Gestapo is a bold and worthwhile attempt to understand something of these monstrous men and of their strange decade, but in fact it explains very little. The mass of evidence in the Nürnbergr...