A useful addition to the literature about Nazi hunters, a body of work that continues to grow.
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
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | JEWISH | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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