But then this 47-year-old was accustomed to such feelings, because he had been on the run for the past four years — ever since the end of the war. For over three of those years he had hidden in huts and shacks high in the Austrian Alps, accompanied by a former private in the SS. They survived on whatever provisions his ever-loyal wife could haul up to him.
With British and American troops scouring the valleys below, the man would have reflected on his previous life during the war, when he was Nazi governor of the Polish province of Galicia, a full general in the SS with the power of life and death over millions.
And it was a power that the aristocratic Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter had been more than happy to wield. During his two years running the province, an estimated 500,000 Jews were sent to their deaths, while hundreds, perhaps thousands more, were killed in reprisals.
As a major war criminal, indicted for war crimes by the Polish government-in-exile as early as October 1942, it was hardly surprising that as soon as the war ended, Wächter — the name is pronounced ‘Vekkter’ — hotfooted it into the hills.
But on that night in Rome, the former Nazi bigwig was now just small fry, a piece of flotsam on the flood of humanity surging around a ravaged Europe. He had no friends, no power, and no idea of what the future held.
The twisting tale of the career and flight of Otto von Wächter sounds like something that would make a superb film or a TV box set. However, surprisingly perhaps, it is in fact the subject of a ten-part podcast produced by the BBC called Intrigue: The Ratline.
For those not up to speed with the bewildering number of ways in which one can access media these days, a podcast is typically a series of audio programmes that can be downloaded and then listened to on a PC, smartphone, laptop, tablet or iPod.
Unlike a regular radio programme that has to be tuned into at a scheduled time, a podcast has the immense convenience of being available whenever you want it.
Podcasts are now big business, partly due to the rise in those about crime, whether fictional, or — like The Ratline — historical.
The most popular such podcast has been a series called Serial, which started in 2014 and was about the murder in 1999 of an American schoolgirl called Hae Min Lee. It has been downloaded 208 million times — the type of listening figures that no radio station could ever hope to boast about.
There’s no doubt the BBC is hoping The Ratline will attract a similar number of downloads, and although it has not released any figures, it certainly looks like the podcast is going to be a hit.
Not only do the critics love it, with the doyenne of radio critics Gillian Reynolds calling it ‘an astounding piece of work, miles better than Serial’, but even the quickest of scans through social media sites reveals that people are lapping it up.
But why is The Ratline proving so popular? The short answer is that the series has it all: Nazis, spies, the attics of German castles creaking with secrets, shady bishops, a love story, murders and other horrors — as well as an old man trying to make sense of his father’s legacy.
That old man is Horst von Wächter, who ardently maintains that his father was a ‘good Nazi’, and was not responsible for the terrible crimes committed against the Jews and so many others when Otto was the governor of Galicia.
MailOnline
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