Editorial Content for The Nazi Hunters
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Soon the world will lose all the generations that had any direct experience of the horrors of mass exterminations, torture and inhuman acts perpetrated against millions of defenseless people under the Nazi regime. Andrew Nagorski, more than 30 years a foreign correspondent for Newsweek and author of HITLERLAND, has researched the end of the end, the last men and women who sought out and exposed the last of the perpetrators.
Central among the “Nazi hunters” is Simon Wiesenthal, who helped to track down a major engineer of the “final solution,” Adolf Eichmann. But Wiesenthal had smaller satisfactions, as he explained to Nagorski in an interview recounted here. Hearing German teens asserting that the story of Anne Frank was merely Jewish propaganda, Wiesenthal determined to successfully locate and expose the S.S. officer who arrested Anne and her family.
"The author offers detailed accounts of the methods used to locate high-profile Nazi operatives, spycraft often highly unconventional and...tirelessly utilized over a period of years. He also expertly examines the cross-current of issues that ran through those operations."
Nagorski names many intrepid “hunters” who decided, for reasons often as much personal as professional, to track these mass murderers and find legal ways to hold them accountable. Benjamin Ferencz was a young Hungarian-born American lawyer who visited the death camps at the end of the war, then was put in charge of the Einsatzgruppen Case at Nuremberg. Hungarian judge Jan Sehn interrogated Rudolf Höss and convinced him to write his autobiography while waiting to be hanged. That memoir was later read to Eichmann. Beate and Serge Klarsfeld were influential in getting the goods on numerous Nazis in hiding.
The author offers detailed accounts of the methods used to locate high-profile Nazi operatives, spycraft often highly unconventional and, as in the case of Eichmann, tirelessly utilized over a period of years. He also expertly examines the cross-current of issues that ran through those operations. One source of philosophical controversy was the theory, widely propounded by noted Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt (A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL), that Eichmann was a rather ordinary man and that others placed in similar circumstances would do as he had done. In the struggle for absolute justice for the instigators and supporters of the death camps, two major principles arose: that neither the compulsion to follow orders nor the age of the perpetrators constituted a defense of their actions. Thus, as recently as 2011, evidence was offered against John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, then age 91 and living incognito in the US, charged with accessory to 27,900 murders in his role as a concentration camp guard.
Nagorski believes that even after this era is over, thoughtful students of history must look at what happened in Hitler’s Germany and ask, “How could human beings be capable of such monstrous behavior?”
Audiobook available, read by Kevin Stillwell
Teaser
After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. THE NAZI HUNTERS focuses on the small band of men and women who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten --- and who were determined to track them down to the farthest corners of the earth.
Promo
After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. THE NAZI HUNTERS focuses on the small band of men and women who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten --- and who were determined to track them down to the farthest corners of the earth.
About the Book
More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi Hunters is drawing to a close as they and the hunted die off. Their saga can now be told almost in its entirety.
After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. THE NAZI HUNTERS focuses on the small band of men and women who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten --- and who were determined to track them down to the furthest corners of the earth.
THE NAZI HUNTERS reveals the experiences of the young American prosecutors in the Nuremberg and Dachau trials, Benjamin Ferencz and William Denson; the Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn, who handled the case of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; Germany’s judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who repeatedly forced his countrymen to confront their country’s record of mass murder; the Mossad agent Rafi Eitan, who was in charge of the Israeli team that nabbed Eichmann; and Eli Rosenbaum, who rose to head the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations that belatedly sought to expel war criminals who were living quietly in the United States. But some of the Nazi hunters’ most controversial actions involved the more ambiguous cases, such as former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s attempt to cover up his wartime history. Or the fate of concentration camp guards who have lived into their 90s, long past the time when reliable eyewitnesses could be found to pinpoint their exact roles.
The story of the Nazi hunters is coming to a natural end. It was unprecedented in so many ways, especially the degree to which the initial impulse of revenge was transformed into a struggle for justice. The Nazi hunters have transformed our fundamental notions of right and wrong. Andrew Nagorski’s book is a richly reconstructed odyssey and an unforgettable tale of gritty determination, at times reckless behavior and relentless pursuit.
Audiobook available, read by Kevin Stillwell
