He was the great love of her mother’s life. He was accused of the murders of 350,000 people. He was a key cog in the Nazi murder machine. He was a Jew hunter “by profession.” Bestselling author Gisela Heidenreich goes searching for the career Nazi diplomat Horst Wagner, who almost became her new father, who fled to South America with her mother’s help, who was able to escape justice for decades with the help of his old comrades. The life story of a perfectly normal German man of the 20th century. Career-minded, a Jew-hater, a coward.
Wagner’s career was unusual even for a Nazi, as he made it to an important position without having a secondary school education. This was only possible because he was a protégé of Von Ribbentrop. Soon Wagner became Heinrich Himmler’s liaison in the Foreign Office.
Originally slated to be tried at Nuremberg, he ended up only being interrogated as a witness because there were so many defendants. The Nuremberg prison is where he met and fell in love with the author’s mother. He escaped and made it to South America. Later he came back to Europe under an assumed name, living in Italy at first. Then in the late 1950s he came back to Germany and even resumed using his real name. Obviously he didn’t think he’d ever be investigated. But he was, though a trial kept being postponed thanks to tricky lawyers. In 1972 he was declared unfit to stand trial because of rheumatism. He died in 1977.
The author spent years and traveled far and wide researching the man who almost became her father. The man to whom her mother said, “Everything that happened was all right, because it led me to you.”
by Gisela Heidenreich
320 pages, 3-426-27432-3
November 2011
