IN PURSUIT
The Men and Women Who Hunted the Nazis
Andrew Nagorski
Simon & Schuster
393 pages; Rs 699
Among World War II's multiple legacies to politics and society the term "genocide" is probably the most significant. It entered the legal lexicon as a new category of international crime in the mid-1940s following more than a decade of lobbying by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish refugee and lawyer. Lemkin had been warning Europe's leaders since 1933 that Adolf Hitler was determined to exterminate an entire race. His appeals fell on receptive ears only after the tally of European Jews annihilated by the Nazi regime crossed six million.
The work of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, instituted by the Allied victors after the war, is regarded as a valiant, if flawed, effort to bring Nazi leaders to book for these and other war crimes. The trials had noteworthy successes, sentencing to death 10 of the 12 top Nazis, and created a precedent in international law that endures today. In recording the evidence of thousands of victims, the trials also created an authentic historical record of officially sanctioned crimes against humanity, which principally involved killing Jews, in unimaginably cruel ways, simply because they were Jews.
The widely publicised Nuremberg trials were cathartic in that they invested a European imperial war with a modicum of legitimacy for the Allies. But as the hot war congealed into the Cold War, the aim of justice for the victims of the Holocaust was rapidly subordinated to the new geo-strategic compulsions of the United States and its principal European ally, Britain. Realigned priorities meant that thousands of Germans who served the Nazi regime were now needed, first, to run a country decimated by the war and, more importantly, to provide intelligence on former ally and new enemy, the Communist regime of Russia.
Thus, the Allies kept their eyes wide shut as many of the chief Nazis availed themselves of escape routes to havens in South America and West Asia. Millions of others hid in plain sight, blending in with the general population. The fact that many of the egregious representatives of the regime were brought to justice in spite of this unofficial pullback is courtesy a band of dogged, courageous and often eccentric men and women. Andrew Nagorski's In Pursuit tells their stories with all the compelling detail and drama that only a seasoned reporter can achieve.
Thanks in no small measure to his own inexhaustible self-publicity, the story of Simon Wiesenthal and the role he played in the capture by Israel's Mossad of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, has become the stuff of legends. But there were many others, either within the Allied administrative machinery or operating independently, who strove just as hard and managed equally spectacular successes. Wiesenthal features here, as he must, but Mr Nagorski has leveraged a long career as Newsweek bureau chief on both sides of the former Iron Curtain to trace the history of the less remembered "Nazi hunters", as this disparate group came to be known.
Had it not been for them, some of the star criminals of the Nazi empire would never have been found. Among many others, they smoked out Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief known as the Butcher of Lyon; Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commander of Auschwitz; Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's "Dr Death"; Kurt Waldheim, who, bizarrely, rose to become UN Secretary General despite his questionable wartime record in the Balkans.
Given this grisly roll call, it is no surprise that many of the Nazi hunters were Holocaust survivors like Wiesenthal and his Eichmann-hunting "frenemy", Tuvia Friedman. But many others were individuals with strong moral compasses. The American Benjamin Ferencz, for instance, was the 27-year-old chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial of commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special squads operating on the Eastern Front, who murdered Jews, Gypsies and civilian enemies. A Hungarian Jew by origin, he was part of the first wave of soldiers to land on Omaha Beach in northern France, and saw at first hand the camps at Buchenwald and Mauthausen.
Then there was the Frenchwoman Beate Klarsfield, who famously slapped the German Chancellor Kurt Kiesenger, who had been a member of the Nazi Party. She and her husband Serge, whose father died in Auschwitz, worked meticulously to gather and publicise records of SS men guilty of deporting and murdering Jews in France. It was Jan Sehn, a Polish investigating judge, who persuaded Höss to write his memoirs, providing for posterity a chilling account detailing how he improved the camp's death machinery.
Not all the labours of these men and women resulted in satisfactory endings but, as Mr Nagorski writes, their efforts "also explored the nature of evil and raised profoundly troubling questions about human behaviour". In Pursuit, in fact, is set within this broad framework. The author explains his motive for writing this book: "Most of the Nazi hunters, along with the hunted, will soon exist only in our collective memories, where myth and reality are likely to become even more intertwined than they are today. Which is why their stories can and should be told now."
The Men and Women Who Hunted the Nazis
Andrew Nagorski
Simon & Schuster
393 pages; Rs 699
Among World War II's multiple legacies to politics and society the term "genocide" is probably the most significant. It entered the legal lexicon as a new category of international crime in the mid-1940s following more than a decade of lobbying by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish refugee and lawyer. Lemkin had been warning Europe's leaders since 1933 that Adolf Hitler was determined to exterminate an entire race. His appeals fell on receptive ears only after the tally of European Jews annihilated by the Nazi regime crossed six million.
The work of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, instituted by the Allied victors after the war, is regarded as a valiant, if flawed, effort to bring Nazi leaders to book for these and other war crimes. The trials had noteworthy successes, sentencing to death 10 of the 12 top Nazis, and created a precedent in international law that endures today. In recording the evidence of thousands of victims, the trials also created an authentic historical record of officially sanctioned crimes against humanity, which principally involved killing Jews, in unimaginably cruel ways, simply because they were Jews.
The widely publicised Nuremberg trials were cathartic in that they invested a European imperial war with a modicum of legitimacy for the Allies. But as the hot war congealed into the Cold War, the aim of justice for the victims of the Holocaust was rapidly subordinated to the new geo-strategic compulsions of the United States and its principal European ally, Britain. Realigned priorities meant that thousands of Germans who served the Nazi regime were now needed, first, to run a country decimated by the war and, more importantly, to provide intelligence on former ally and new enemy, the Communist regime of Russia.
Thus, the Allies kept their eyes wide shut as many of the chief Nazis availed themselves of escape routes to havens in South America and West Asia. Millions of others hid in plain sight, blending in with the general population. The fact that many of the egregious representatives of the regime were brought to justice in spite of this unofficial pullback is courtesy a band of dogged, courageous and often eccentric men and women. Andrew Nagorski's In Pursuit tells their stories with all the compelling detail and drama that only a seasoned reporter can achieve.
Thanks in no small measure to his own inexhaustible self-publicity, the story of Simon Wiesenthal and the role he played in the capture by Israel's Mossad of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, has become the stuff of legends. But there were many others, either within the Allied administrative machinery or operating independently, who strove just as hard and managed equally spectacular successes. Wiesenthal features here, as he must, but Mr Nagorski has leveraged a long career as Newsweek bureau chief on both sides of the former Iron Curtain to trace the history of the less remembered "Nazi hunters", as this disparate group came to be known.
Had it not been for them, some of the star criminals of the Nazi empire would never have been found. Among many others, they smoked out Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief known as the Butcher of Lyon; Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commander of Auschwitz; Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's "Dr Death"; Kurt Waldheim, who, bizarrely, rose to become UN Secretary General despite his questionable wartime record in the Balkans.
Given this grisly roll call, it is no surprise that many of the Nazi hunters were Holocaust survivors like Wiesenthal and his Eichmann-hunting "frenemy", Tuvia Friedman. But many others were individuals with strong moral compasses. The American Benjamin Ferencz, for instance, was the 27-year-old chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial of commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special squads operating on the Eastern Front, who murdered Jews, Gypsies and civilian enemies. A Hungarian Jew by origin, he was part of the first wave of soldiers to land on Omaha Beach in northern France, and saw at first hand the camps at Buchenwald and Mauthausen.
Then there was the Frenchwoman Beate Klarsfield, who famously slapped the German Chancellor Kurt Kiesenger, who had been a member of the Nazi Party. She and her husband Serge, whose father died in Auschwitz, worked meticulously to gather and publicise records of SS men guilty of deporting and murdering Jews in France. It was Jan Sehn, a Polish investigating judge, who persuaded Höss to write his memoirs, providing for posterity a chilling account detailing how he improved the camp's death machinery.
Not all the labours of these men and women resulted in satisfactory endings but, as Mr Nagorski writes, their efforts "also explored the nature of evil and raised profoundly troubling questions about human behaviour". In Pursuit, in fact, is set within this broad framework. The author explains his motive for writing this book: "Most of the Nazi hunters, along with the hunted, will soon exist only in our collective memories, where myth and reality are likely to become even more intertwined than they are today. Which is why their stories can and should be told now."
Mr Nagorski's effort may be in vain. Today, the cynical leveraging of the Holocaust for political ends has created another kind of tragedy in West Asia, that too in a way that certainly dishonours the memory of its victims.