A Crime In The Family

In the spring of 1945, as the Red Army advanced towards the village of Rechnitz in Austria, Countess Margit Batthyany hosted one final party in her ancestral home.

Around midnight, the guests - German aristocrats and SS officers - left the castle and shot 180 Jewish labourers waiting in the village below. The bodies disappeared into a mass grave and the massacre remained a secret for decades, until Countess Margit's great-nephew began to ask questions.

This is the story of those questions, and of the answers Sacha Batthyany found: of how an atrocity was concealed and how it was uncovered.

It is a story of Nazi Germany, of the gulags of Siberia, of Budapest in the darkest days of the Cold War; of an Auschwitz survivor alive today in Argentina, and of whole generations of Europeans, monsters and heroes, executioners and victims.