For 10 years now, Philippe Sands – leading international lawyer, professor and practising barrister – has been ­grappling with one of the most intractable questions of our time.

The Ratline
PHILIPPE SANDS
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 432 PP, £20)
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For 10 years now, Philippe Sands – leading international lawyer, professor and practising barrister – has been ­grappling with one of the most intractable questions of our time. When the mass slaughter of Jews and others by the Nazis began, what kind of people turned on other people, and why did so many more let it happen? His search for answers has already led him to give lectures, write articles, make an outstanding television documentary and a podcast and, in 2016, to publish East West Street, perhaps the outstanding non-fiction book of the decade.

That book began as a personal quest to discover what happened to his Jewish forebears under Nazi occupation in the Eastern European city of Lviv; it broadened out into an account of how genocide and crimes against humanity became established legal concepts. Now Sands narrows his focus to follow a single thread of the tapestry, the story of one man, Otto Wächter, using archival research, fresh personal material and his own long-standing, complex relationship with Wächter’s surviving son, Horst.

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