CITIZEN 865

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.