The Nazi Hunters focuses on the small band of men and women who refused to allow Nazi's crimes to be forgotten - and who were determined to track them down to the furthest corners of the earth.
A few, like Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal and the German-French couple Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, achieve international fame. And dramatic events like the kidnapping of Hitler's henchman Adolf Eichmann by an Israeli commando squad in Buenos Aires, followed by his trial and execution in Jerusalem, generated huge headlines. But many of the key characters and some of their most daring escapades are far less known. Their stories are finally told here.
Among the key players are 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 Hoess; 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 U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations that belatedly sought to expel war criminals who were living quietly in the United States.
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. Their richly reconstructed odyssey is an unforgettable tale of gritty determination, at times reckless behaviour, and relentless pursuit.
Nagorski's Nazis Hunter's story picks up after the Nuremberg trials. The official search for Nazis waned, partly because we became obsessed with the communists and partly because we felt that Germany just needed to get on with its healing from its reign of terror.
For some reason I thought that most of the war criminals of WWII were arrested and prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials, this appears not to have been the case. Nagorski book covers some of the men and women that continued to search for war criminals well into the twenty-first century.
