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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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