Athene Palace by R.G. Waldeck

Description

The Athene Palace Hotel was the place to be…

As European capitals fell during 1940 and 1941, there swarmed to the Athene Palace, Bucharest’s Grand Hotel, diplomats, generals, Gestapo spies, and demi-mondaines from all over Europe. Arriving at the crowded Athene Palace on the day Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, the American woman journalist Rosa Goldschmidt Waldeck observed for seven months, following all the events and the international figures that made Romania Europe’s last sensational hotbed of intrigue and color.

Here you see Hitler’s beautiful feminine agents holding court in the Athene Palace lobby within eyeshot of British diplomats, while around them move fifth columnists, German economists and generals, American and English diplomats and newspapermen, who made the Athene Palace the most glamorous spot on the continent. The dramatic events of this turbulent period in history are described here chiefly in terms of personalities: Carol and Lupescu, Antonescu and Dr. Clodius, Nazi Gauleiters, British Quislings, Romanian appeasers, and all the types who dominated the scene of World War II Europe… On the surface this is a fast-moving, dramatic book, as readable as a novel, but it is at the same time a most effective dissection of the Nazi New Order.

About the edition

This new edition of this classic work, originally published during the Second World War, is enhanced by a thorough introductory study on the author’s life and work written by the leading authority on Waldeck, Dr. Ernest H. Latham, Jr., former cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Bucharest. Dr. Latham is a well-known specialist in Romanian history and has done extensive research on American and British journalists in Romania during World War II. See also his excellent introduction for Donald Dunham, Assignment: Bucharest.

Date of Publication: 2018
Language: English
Hardcover, 382 pp., 6 x 9 in.