Sands presents a riveting Nazi love story in four parts (“Love”, “Power”, “Flight” and “Death”), recounting how Otto and Charlotte first met, their courtship, his affairs, her frustrations, their common devotion to Hitler’s revolution and its antisemitic agenda, his escape, and their children’s struggles with this history. The son of a conservative Habsburg monarchist, Baron Otto von Wächter (1901–49) earned a doctorate in law at a young age and was an early supporter of the Nazi Party, joining the Storm Troopers in 1923 and the Party in 1930. One of Charlotte’s first gifts to Otto was a copy of Mein Kampf. She became a Party member in 1931 and they socialized (and plotted) with other Nazi elites at the Deutsche Klub in Vienna. Accepted into the SS in 1932, Wächter participated in an attempted coup in 1934 that resulted in the murder of the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Otto fled to Germany and excelled as a ruthless administrator in the Berlin headquarters of the elite security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). In 1938, Wächter, like his colleague Eichmann, became a key figure in the Anschluss. While the former focused on emigration and the expropriation of Jews’ property, Wächter purged Jews and other declared enemies from the civil service.
