Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, from Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial [Paperback]

Anthony M. Platt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1594511403 | ISBN-13: 978-1594511400 | Publication Date: December 15, 2005

At the end of World War II, an American military intelligence team retrieved an original copy of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler, and turned over this rare document to General George S. Patton. In 1999, after fifty-five years in the vault of the Huntington Library in southern California, the Nuremberg Laws resurfaced and were put on public display for the first time at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In this far-ranging, interdisciplinary study that is part historical analysis, part cultural critique, part detective story, and part memoir, Tony Platt explores a range of interrelated issues: war-time looting, remembrance of the holocaust, German and American eugenics, and the public responsibilities of museums and cultural centers. This book is based on original research by the author and co-researcher, historian Cecilia O'Leary, in government, military, and library archives; interviews and oral histories; and participant observation. It is both a detailed, scholarly analysis and a record of the author's activist efforts to correct the historical record.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Tony Platt's pursuit of the notorious Nuremberg documents of the Nazi regime is a fascinating excursion into history. It is also full of provocative insights about the culture of remembering. --Howard Zinn

First and foremost, this is an astonishing, and eye-opening, historical investigation. In a wonderfully sustained narrative, several stories apparently remote in time and place are interwoven skillfully, in a book that gives the reader all the pleasures of following the most gripping detective story. In moving seamlessly from early twentieth-century California, to 1930s Germany, and back to early twenty-first-century Los Angeles, Tony Platt obliges us to question the complexities of personal and historical memory, as well as the practices and responsibilities of our contemporary museums. --Janet Wolff, Professor of Arts, Columbia University

Recommended all levels and libraries. --Choice

About the Author

Anthony M. Platt is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, where he has taught since 1977. Previously, he taught at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. His books include The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969); The Politics of Riot Commissions, 1917-1970 ( MacMillan, 1971); and E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (Rutgers University Press, 1991). His essays have appeared in Monthly Review, Z magazine, Los Angeles Times, Souls, and Social Justice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Paradigm Publishers (December 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594511403
• ISBN-13: 978-1594511400
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #712,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Educational, October 15, 2007

By 

Terry "ETO_Buff" (Las Vegas, NV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, from Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial (Paperback)

As someone that grew up in Pasadena, California, and is well acquainted with San Gabriel, San Marino, and the Huntington Library, I was shocked at the things I learned about many of the founding figures of those communities and that institution.

Anyone that has allowed George S. Patton's military brilliance make them think that he was also a good person will have those illusions shattered by this book.

Extremely well-researched over the course of many years, this book explains how Patton recovered what experts have determined to be either the third or fourth draft of a total of four drafts of the Nuremburg Laws - the laws that took away the rights and citizenship of Germany's Jews and opened the door to the Holocaust of European Jewry. Then, in disobedience to a direct written order from Eisenhower forbidding Nazi documents from being removed from Germany so that they could be used as evidence in the prosecution of war criminals, Patton personally carried this draft of the laws to the curator of the Huntington Library, a close friend of Patton's father, and instructed him to hide them and to not reveal their whereabouts during Patton's lifetime.

The Huntington revealed the laws to the press in 1997, and has permanently loaned them to the Skirball Center in West Los Angeles, where I saw them on display in 2007.

The book also investigates the collaboration of scientists from what was to become known as the California Institute of Tecnology (CalTech), and Nazi scientists in Germany, to promote the theory that the bloodlines of caucasians are superior to that of Jews, Africans, Slavs, Asians, and others. Those theories amongst American scientists were quickly shelved as war broke out, and then abandoned altogether when the world found out about the Holocaust, and the scientists were afraid their theories may be frowned upon by the civilized world.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Testament to a Travesty, August 27, 2010

By 

Jeannette M. Hartman (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, from Patton's Trophy to Public Memorial (Paperback)

Anthony Platt's investigation of what happened to a typescript copy of the Nuremberg Laws, signed by Adolph Hitler, from its discovery in a German bank in 1945 to its resurfacing in 1999 as a loan from the Huntington Library to the Skirball Cultural Center is thought-provoking. The document was found by Sgt. Martin Dannenberg, who was in charge of an Army counterintelligence team at the time and had seen Dachau only days earlier. Platt's research led him to Dannenberg in 1999 and to an exploration of how the document ended up in the hands of Gen. George S. Patton Jr., then into the vaults of the Huntington Library in 1945. Dannenberg, who died Aug. 18, 2010, turned the document over to 3rd Army Headquarters with the expectation that it would be used in building the legal case against the Nazis. Patton's possession of the document was against Army regulations. Platt further uncovered that the Huntington's possession of the document went against the Patton familly wishes. The document had been part of the Holocaust exhibit at the Skirball until late 2009. This month Steven S. Koblik, president of the Huntington, said that the documents were being permanently placed in the National Archives in Washington, DC, as the Patton family had wished. Platt's book provokes thought about the responsibilities of libraries and museums, even private ones, the myths and realities of Patton and the importance of protecting historical documents from wartime souvenir collectors.