Author Bio:
Salvatore Tagliareni is a story teller, writer, business consultant, art dealer, and former Catholic priest. For over 25 years he has successfully engaged private and public companies in their search for outstanding performance. A gifted speaker, he is blessed with a great sense of humor and can invigorate an audience with insights on life and leadership. Salvatore was profoundly influenced by his relationship with Dr. Viktor Frankl, the celebrated psychiatrist and author of "Man’s Search for Meaning." The desire to humanize the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust was the driving force behind the novel Hitler’s Priest.
Salvatore is the former president of Next Step Associates an organizational consulting firm. For 25 years he performed strategic planning and organizational design and implementation for many large International companies such as Johnson and Johnson, IBM, Hoffman La-Roche and Boston Financial.
As a young Catholic priest studying theology in Rome, his life was forever changed when the tragic and unexpected death of his best friend led him to seek and gain mentorship from Dr. Frankl. Dr. Frankl and other Holocaust survivors changed the course of Salvatore’s life as they shared their personal horrors under the Nazi regime.
After leaving active ministry as an ordained Catholic priest in 1970, Salvatore went on to earn a Ph.D. in Leadership and Organizational Behavior and had a successful career as an international business consultant. Salvatore lives in Washington, DC with his wife of 40 years and returns to Europe as often as possible.
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Editorial Review:
The ashes of pages at this point in his conversion would one day lead to the ashes of persons.
The ultimate nightmare of the slow conversion of a young man in Nazi Germany, a young man with a bright future, who loves his family, even his Jewish relatives, but whose own need for acceptance and power is used to build the evil Wehrmacht machine.
Gerhardt Stark, whose own father taught him the skills of architecture while still a boy, dreams of becoming like him to build a beautiful city in Germany. After his father dies in the first World War, and his mother remarries a scoundrel, Gerhardt turns to the security of his Jewish relatives – finding a friend and a brother in his cousin, Micah. But the emptiness of loss leaves a deep hole, one ripe for the filling of the new Nazi ideologies.
His progression from a wealthy class youth to a rapacious mass murderer sheds light on not only his character, but on the poison which infected so many “lost” young men who lost fathers in the Great War and who believed Germany was stripped of victory in that war. Gerhardt’s indoctrination begins slow as he is, at first, not a believer. After meeting Frieda, a beautiful German girl, he is seduced by her charms and by the ideals of the National Socialist Party. It doesn’t take much to push him over the edge... an edge which causes him to turn his back on all that he knew in his past, even rejecting the very family who took him in at a very vulnerable time. With his incredible intellect, skills as an architect, and “poster-boy” Aryan good looks, he catches the eye of Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler, both of whom use his skills to implement the final solution and expand Auschwitz-Birkenau to dispose of the Jews in a quicker way.
He had no regrets in his behavior and this glorious night in Nuremberg enabled him to pledge even his life to the Fuhrer. At this point, for Gerhardt there were no longer questions of ethics or morality. The trappings of meaningless rules and religious beliefs were severed from his mind and soul. He had been given the gift of genuine purpose that would enable complete total responses to all the cause would require in the future.
Once a nominal Christian, he found in the Nazi vision of the world something more compelling than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. His new bible was Mein Kampf. He was baptized into a cult that was going to last for a thousand years.
Young men on both sides of the barbed wire were fodder for politicians’ lust for glory. Of course, politicians, in faraway safe havens, did not live the soldiers’ daily nightmares. For politicians, the dead and wounded were merely statistics; sacrifices were necessary to achieve some selfish national gain.
But the dream of a thousand year Reich draws to a close as the Allies defeat the German army, and Gerhardt knows he must find a way to survive or he will be tried as a war criminal. With the aid of another SS officer, Gerhardt implements a plan of escape by using two Jews from Auschwitz as pawns – promising them their life as a way to ensure his own survival. In the storyline, you come to know these two Jews – Svi and Lorenzo – whose prominent background before the war gives Gerhardt the ammunition needed for this plan to work. With his own new identity, he rescues Svi and Lorenzo, who both vow to one day thank the man who saved their life.
Gerhardt, now known as George Baum, flees Europe a very wealthy man (all made from stolen art and valuables form the Jews), first to Spain, and then, to New York City, where he becomes a prominent architect. But George Baum, who thinks all who would recognize him are dead, doesn’t factor fate into the equation and that ‘payback is a b****’.
A young Jewish woman, Esther, who survived the war and who suffers from nightmares branded with Gerhardt Stark’s face, has also made it to New York to begin a new life. In a series of unpredictable events which include Svi and Lorenzo, an association with members of the Nakam (those searching for Nazi war criminals)... and the unexpected arrival of someone from Gerhardt’s past... brings Esther into the ultimate search for justice with Gerhardt Stark in her crosshairs.
From the outset, this book was a difficult read, not only for the topic and to follow a protagonist that you ultimately begin to hate, but the initial storyline took a while to immerse into as a reader. Despite the immense amount of typos (an easy fix) the narrative eventually sped into an intriguing middle. However, with a slow start, a speedy middle, I felt the ending wrapped up in an anticlimactic rushed way – a bit too quick for a man who took delight in the slow torture of so many Jews. As a character, you really get a sense of Gerhardt as a person, and the author does a good job at developing the characters and at one point, I looked up to see if this was actually a real historical person. The story, itself, taken from the POV of an “architect” in close association with Hitler reveals the dangerous ideologies that can infiltrate any society whose emotional holes are filled with political fodder and fake nationalistic bravado when, in reality, the core lies in greed and racism; thus, this book is a scary read in reflection to our own modern society today. As a novel, some things need to be addressed which will lend more to a clearer story, albeit a disturbing one.
*****
“The Architect of Auschwitz” by S. G. Tagliareni is awarded 3.9 stars by The Historical Fiction Company.