Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.