Kenneth D. Alford

There are facets of this book are very interesting. I once read that Eva Braun is not a historian's delight, and I can quite understand that statement by reading this book. There is indeed very little information available about Eva Braun in this book, and not too much about their relationship.

There do seem to have been more women who were fascinated by Hitler than I realised. However, this may have been because he held power, and had a strange magnetism of his own.

The book is more of a terse chronology of the war, as seen from the events surrounding those closest to Hitler - notably, the women.

A slight picture of Eva emerges. Spoiled, immature to start - maybe. A women who had her own admirable streaks of character, and which have not really been appreciated. For one, she seems to have genuinely loved him, and was intensely loyal to him as a person. Very few people are like this.
Second, she did not seek to manipulate him, or gain undue favours for her friends and family.

Her pictorial documentation of events and things is fascinating, and does need some more attention.

A shadowy creature, but with some good character traits, I think. In the end, she emerged (in my eyes), a stronger person than Hitler.… (más)

Nazi Plunder is Kenneth D. Alford's attempt to sift through the murky history of looting in the latter stages of the Second World War in Europe, focusing primarily on the plunder of Europe's art and historical treasures by the Nazis and taken for 'safekeeping' by the victorious Americans. Providing accounts of unsavoury acquisition by the Americans at both an official level and amongst individual soldiers, Alford has a lot of fascinating material at his disposal. Unfortunately, he is largely content to regurgitate information he has researched rather than weave it into a consistently readable account. Early on, he even goes into a rather long and unnecessary overview of the war in Europe ('in 1933, Hitler became Chancellor', 'occupied the Sudetenland', 'invaded Poland in September 1939...', etc., etc.) when any reader with even a basic knowledge of history will already be familiar with this. The book deals with its subject piecemeal and with little regard for chronology (for example, Chapter Three ends with Hermann Göring's suicide and Chapter Four begins some months earlier with the former Reichsmarschall's surrender), resulting in a discontinuity in the narrative. Overall, the book reads like it was assembled rather than written.

Marred by spelling and punctuation inaccuracies (Alford also has a penchant for exclamation marks which often cheapen the points that he is trying to make!), Nazi Plunder fails to convince as an authoritative voice on its subject. One of the most egregious examples comes on page 201, where in a single paragraph Alford alternates between Grasleben (correct) and Gasleben (incorrect) four times. These sort of mistakes (which occur throughout) shake the reader's confidence and leads one to question whether some of the facts in the book may also be erroneous. For example, on page 136 Alford ends a rather interesting story with the statement: "Six months later, Dagley was still in prison. His final fate is unknown." Intrigued by this, which in the context of the story suggested that an American soldier was imprisoned by the Soviets and vanished off the face of the earth, a quick Google search for the Curtis Dagley of the story informed me that he was released after a few months and returned to the States, where he became a fisherman. It is this sort of thing which is to the book's great detriment.

Nazi Plunder did provide some remarkable stories, particularly concerning the more shady characters of the American occupation force, and it is interesting to learn just how many treasures were still being hoarded by the United States when the book was written in 2001 (for all I know, they still are now in 2014). But the book lacks polish and payoff, and Alford ends many chapters with fudging ambiguities such as 'what else could be hiding there?', 'what else is waiting to be discovered?' and 'we may never know the truth'. Alford is clearly a passionate researcher on the subject, and it is an interesting one to learn about. But my interest in the subject and my confidence in Alford's facts were dampened by the barely-adequate delivery. It is an interesting subject but I can't in good conscience recommend this book as an introduction to it. There is a great book out there that may one day be written on this fascinating subject, but this isn't it.… (más)

This is a poorly written work covering an important footnote to history - the theft and return of works of art during war time. While I received this book as part of Early Reviewers, there is nothing to indicate on my copy that this is still a work in progress. It appears to have already been published. That is quite unfortunate because this book is in dire need of an editor. Simple editing errors in writing include using the EXACT same sentence twice in one paragraph, the use of initials representing an organization before the actual introduction of that organization and what those initials mean, and a tendency to repeat the most mundane facts multiple times throughout the book (i.e., when in Chapter 19 we are still being told what the Linz Museum was and its relation to Hitler - after being told multiple times earlier in the book).

All of these faulty mechanics results in a book which is simply difficult to read. I did finish it, because buried within the morass was individual nuggets of interesting details I had not previously known, and the author's use of first hand sources is laudable, but I feel in the end it was not worth my time. There are many other books written about this subject matter, and most of them handle it better than Alford did in this one.… (más)