Joining the SS in the 1930s, Austrian lawyer Baron Otto von Wächter became governor of Galicia and the creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto. When Wächter was indicted for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, he plotted his escape to South America via the infamous "Ratline." Drawing on family correspondence, the author of East West Street tells the full story of this brutal bureaucrat's life, while chronicling attempts by Wächter's son to prove that his father was a good man who was wrongly accused.