Death Comes for the Gruppenführer
“There’s something going on here,” said Lisa Jardine, the British historian, as she scrolled on a laptop through a digitized cache of letters, ochre with age. “The sheer volume. It’s rare to have so many, even between a husband and wife. Almost daily. Volume is often a form of concealment. It’s harder to make out what the writer is trying to hide.” The letters—many hundreds of them—had been written by SS Gruppenführer Otto von Wächter, a high-ranking Nazi, and his wife, Charlotte, correspondence that spanned a period from 1930 until Otto’s death, under suspicious circumstances, in Rome in 1949. Wächter, indicted for mass murder, had been in hiding since the fall of the Reich, sheltered in his last days by a powerful bishop. The letters had come into the hands of Philippe Sands, a prominent human-rights lawyer, who was seeking Jardine’s help in bringing them to wider attention.
It was the summer of 2015. Sands, a friend, was at . My wife and I were in London, and Sands asked if we’d like to join him on a morning visit to see Jardine. She was a legendary figure: Renaissance scholar, historian of science, director of the National Archives, fan of the Talking Heads, and all-around woman of affairs. Among other things, she had for six years chaired Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Her home was on a shady street around the corner from the British Museum, its red-brick Victorian countenance relaxing into a bright and airy interior.
