A Crime in the Family

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In the spring of 1945, as the Russian army advanced towards the village of Rechnitz, Countess Margit Batthyány hosted one final party in her ancestral home. Around midnight, the guests - German aristocrats and SS officers - left the mansion and shot 180 Jewish workers waiting in the village bellow. The bodies disappeared into a mass grave: the massacre remained secret for decades, until Countess Margit's great -nephew Sacha began to ask questions. This is the story of those questions, and of the answers Sacha Batthyány found. It is a story of Auschwitz, of the gulags of Siberia, of Budapest in the darkest days of the cold war; and of whole generations of Europeans, monsters and heroes, executioners and victims