From Ice Set Free; The Story of Otto Kiep

New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Fair. [8], 215, [1] pages. Illustrations. Index. DJ has some wear and tears to edges. Pencil erasure residue on half-title. Bruce Clements began writing in the late 1960s. A number of his novels focus on the importance of caring for one's fellow man and, by extension, society's need to be tolerant and supportive of other cultures. Bruce Clements is the author of I Tell a Lie Every So Often, a National Book Award Finalist, and its sequel, A Chapel of Thieves, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. The author is a board member of the Children's Law Center of Connecticut, to which all royalties from What Erika Wants will be donated. His wife, Hannah, was Otto Kiep's daughter. From Ice Set Free: The Story of Otto Kiep is the biographical account of Clements's father-in-law, a German-born Scot who returned to the country of his birth to serve in the German Army during World War I. Otto Kiep was raised in Scotland, where his father had a timber business and was Imperial German Counsel for western Scotland. A successful lawyer and diplomat, Otto Kiep was with the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. from 1927 to 1931 as an embassy adviser, and from 1931 to 1933, he was Consul General in New York. He later established ties with resistance circles, with Hanna Solf and with the Kreisau Circle about Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. He returned to German prior to the dawn of World War II. As Chief of the Reich Press Office, the name Otto Kiep appeared on the list of the group around the men of the failed 20 July Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia. After his arrest in 1944, he was sentenced at the Volksgerichtshof by Roland Freisler to death, and one month after the plot's failure, on 26 August 1944, Otto Kiep was hanged at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. News of Kiep's arrest reached close friend (and Abwehr intelligence agent) Erich Vermehren, who decided to defect to the British along with his wife in January 1944 rather than be arrested by the Gestapo. The defection enraged Hitler, who ordered the Abwehr dissolved. The author calls Otto "a mirror of the first half of this century, showing the best of its hopes, the clearest of its thinking, the brightest and darkest of its days."