Christopher Simpson on 'The Splendid Blond Beast'

The most appalling crime in human affairs is certainly genocide. But perhaps even more shocking is the fact that those who organize and even those who commit mass murder are rarely punished for what they have done. Most, in fact, profit from their crimes. The Splendid Blond Beast is the latest investigation into this seamiest side of the twentieth century, from the author of the award-winning Blowback, the groundbreaking study of the U.S. government's recruitment of former Nazis. Christopher Simpson's new research reveals that CIA chief Allen Dulles organized the escape of the highest-ranking SS killer to survive World War II, along with a number of the officer's senior aides. Each of these Nazis had been personally responsible for the deportation of Jews to death camps and for mass executions of resistance fighters. Dulles also used U.S. government lists to help install former slave-labor specialists in key positions in postwar Germany. In addition to presenting this revelatory expose of government malfeasance, Simpson traces the roots of mass murder as an instrument of state power, from the Armenian genocide of World War I through Hitler's Holocaust. He shows how the existing structures of international law and commerce have at critical points actually encouraged mass murder and the escape of war criminals. Corporate looting and profiteering at the expense of innocents are often built into genocide, Simpson contends, and influence which killers are most likely to escape justice and who is predisposed to help them. The Splendid Blond Beast is a disturbing and often profound book about the roots of evil in our time.