A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist delves into the hunt for Nazi war criminals who entered the United States after World War II, unbeknownst to American immigration authorities.
Many of the mass murderers operating within the European nations occupied by Germany eventually settled in the U.S. using false identities, often starting families and business careers while blending in with unsuspecting neighbors. Although Washington Post investigative reporter Cenziper (Director, Investigative Journalism/Northwestern Univ.; co-author: Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality, 2016) provides sweeping background about the Nazi death camps, she focuses primarily on the Polish village of Trawniki, where the Nazis trained roughly 5,000 men to round up and slaughter the Jews of Poland. Citizen 865 was Jakob Reimer, one of the Trawniki murderers who settled in the U.S. and remained on the radars of Nazi hunters from 1952 through the 1980s. Cenziper unfolds the manhunt narrative by alternating among the killers, their victims, contemporary European record keepers who alternately helped expose the murderers or refused to cooperate with U.S. authorities, and—most prominently—lawyers and historians within the U.S. Justice Department who performed impressive sleuthing to identify the war criminals hiding in the country. The hunters’ goal was to deport the Nazi collaborators to Germany, Austria, or other nations where they might end their lives in prison. As the author recounts the slaughtering of Jews, Poles in the Resistance, Roma people, and Soviet prisoners of war, the descriptions are sometimes sickeningly graphic; some readers might choose to skip over such details. Some of the accounts come from Feliks Wójcik and Lucyna Stryjewska, two Jews who managed to escape death, marry, settle in the U.S., and start a family. The investigative paths followed by Peter Black and Elizabeth “Barry” White, two Justice Department sleuths, are especially gripping.
A useful addition to the literature about Nazi hunters, a body of work that continues to grow.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-44965-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | JEWISH | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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