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sjgrodsky's review against another edition
3.0
The book tells a story that needs to be told, but has some major flaws.
However, I see the many enthusiastic reviews from others and can only be happy that this accessible account reached people who might have ignored more scholarly treatments.
But I also hope that an historian with better writing skills will use this book as source material for the book that still needs to be written.
Here are some of the issues.
1
—
The book is larded with irrelevant side stories. I don’t need to know how Barry White met her husband, or Peter Black’s college trip to Germany, or how Black communicates with his autistic son. These are details Cenziper learned during her research, but they distract from the story I was led to expect.
2
—
The history is fictionalized. The author presents conversations, with direct quotes, that she wasn’t there to hear. She is recreating conversations that her sources described, but her book purports to be history, though popularized history. Imagined conversations are fiction.
3
—
Although there are some statistics buried in the epilogue, the book lacks basic information: how many Nazis, for example, moved to the US? What did they do here? How many did OSI return to their home countries? How many were tried on return? How many convicted? How many died peacefully at home?
There is no comprehensive list of Nazis investigated or returned.
4
—
She gets many small things wrong. A few examples, I could cite many more.
On page 88: “...lights from the national Christmas Tree twinkled along Pennsylvania Avenue..”
But the tree is on the Ellipse, behind the White House and some distance from Pennsylvania Avenue.
On page 92: “taking Black by the scruff of his collar...”
But collars don’t have scruffs.
5
—
The book lacks helpful reader aids, such as a list of characters and a timeline. The one map is subpar— it lacks a scale of miles, region names are printed in a light gray tone that is hard to read.
6
—
Cenziper is at best an adequate prose stylist, with a tendency towards cliches, odd word choices, and awkward sentence structures.
Cliche examples: read a few pages and you will find them.
Awkward sentence structure example, page 91: “It had been 500 Deutschmark cheaper to fly out of the airport in East Berlin in 1971 when 20-year-old Peter Black and two friends studying at the University in Bonn decided to travel to the Middle East on a winter break.”
Odd word choice example, page 146: “...a five story Talmudic building, the largest in the world...” She is referring to the Lublin Yeshiva, a school for the study of Talmud. The term “Talmudic building” is nonsense.
7
—
She did not proofread the final manuscript. If she had, many small errors would have been corrected. One example: it’s “land mines” not “land minds” (page 252).
However, I see the many enthusiastic reviews from others and can only be happy that this accessible account reached people who might have ignored more scholarly treatments.
But I also hope that an historian with better writing skills will use this book as source material for the book that still needs to be written.
Here are some of the issues.
1
—
The book is larded with irrelevant side stories. I don’t need to know how Barry White met her husband, or Peter Black’s college trip to Germany, or how Black communicates with his autistic son. These are details Cenziper learned during her research, but they distract from the story I was led to expect.
2
—
The history is fictionalized. The author presents conversations, with direct quotes, that she wasn’t there to hear. She is recreating conversations that her sources described, but her book purports to be history, though popularized history. Imagined conversations are fiction.
3
—
Although there are some statistics buried in the epilogue, the book lacks basic information: how many Nazis, for example, moved to the US? What did they do here? How many did OSI return to their home countries? How many were tried on return? How many convicted? How many died peacefully at home?
There is no comprehensive list of Nazis investigated or returned.
4
—
She gets many small things wrong. A few examples, I could cite many more.
On page 88: “...lights from the national Christmas Tree twinkled along Pennsylvania Avenue..”
But the tree is on the Ellipse, behind the White House and some distance from Pennsylvania Avenue.
On page 92: “taking Black by the scruff of his collar...”
But collars don’t have scruffs.
5
—
The book lacks helpful reader aids, such as a list of characters and a timeline. The one map is subpar— it lacks a scale of miles, region names are printed in a light gray tone that is hard to read.
6
—
Cenziper is at best an adequate prose stylist, with a tendency towards cliches, odd word choices, and awkward sentence structures.
Cliche examples: read a few pages and you will find them.
Awkward sentence structure example, page 91: “It had been 500 Deutschmark cheaper to fly out of the airport in East Berlin in 1971 when 20-year-old Peter Black and two friends studying at the University in Bonn decided to travel to the Middle East on a winter break.”
Odd word choice example, page 146: “...a five story Talmudic building, the largest in the world...” She is referring to the Lublin Yeshiva, a school for the study of Talmud. The term “Talmudic building” is nonsense.
7
—
She did not proofread the final manuscript. If she had, many small errors would have been corrected. One example: it’s “land mines” not “land minds” (page 252).
specialk136's review against another edition
4.0
I’ve long been drawn to WWII stories because they represent the best and worst of human nature. But this was a new angle for me; the United States’ attempts during the 1990s through early 2000s to de-naturalize and deport former Nazis who had managed to lie about their activities after the war and become Americans.
By the time they were brought to court, they were old and feeble and had been model citizens. It reminded me of another book I’d read on habits (of all things) that talked about the Vietnam War. Something like 15% of American soldiers were addicted to heroin in Vietnam. But after they came back, their environment was so shockingly different that 88% never touched heroin again.
All that to say - the hells of war make ordinary people do things they wouldn’t normally do. And that’s one of the key arguments against prosecuting Nazis after so many years. Their defense teams claim they were under duress, that they only did administrative work, that they’ve not done anything wrong since, and we shouldn’t we just all move on. And yet through the efforts of a small team of intrepid government historians, who we get to know in the book, we found the paper trail to rebut all those arguments and prove that no, there were no innocent Nazi guards.
Accountability matters, so that the horrors of the Holocaust (perpetuated by regular people!) don’t happen again.
This book is well-written in a narrative style, and it exposed a little-known (to me) part of our post-war history. 4.5 stars.
By the time they were brought to court, they were old and feeble and had been model citizens. It reminded me of another book I’d read on habits (of all things) that talked about the Vietnam War. Something like 15% of American soldiers were addicted to heroin in Vietnam. But after they came back, their environment was so shockingly different that 88% never touched heroin again.
All that to say - the hells of war make ordinary people do things they wouldn’t normally do. And that’s one of the key arguments against prosecuting Nazis after so many years. Their defense teams claim they were under duress, that they only did administrative work, that they’ve not done anything wrong since, and we shouldn’t we just all move on. And yet through the efforts of a small team of intrepid government historians, who we get to know in the book, we found the paper trail to rebut all those arguments and prove that no, there were no innocent Nazi guards.
Accountability matters, so that the horrors of the Holocaust (perpetuated by regular people!) don’t happen again.
This book is well-written in a narrative style, and it exposed a little-known (to me) part of our post-war history. 4.5 stars.
daralexandria's review against another edition
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Deportation, Genocide, Gun violence, Rape, Confinement, War, Antisemitism, and Murder
xxstefaniereadsxx's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This book is about a group of Nazi hunters employed by the United States Justice Department. They are on the trail of some Nazis who were supposed to be hiding out in the United States. These were members of the SS. I thought this was a very interesting book, and was very interested in how they went about finding them, scattered to the wind.
dekovash's review against another edition
4.0
I rated this book 4 stars because of the information I learned about WWII and the United States role to bring Nazi perpetrators living quietly in this country to justice. The book itself is disjointed but I appreciate the new insight I gained.
laurenkd89's review against another edition
4.0
I was a history major in college and have always been interested particularly in both American and WWII history. But I had never heard of the subject of this book: the Trawniki men, and the decades-later quest of the Department of Justice to deport Trawniki men living on U.S. soil. The Trawniki men were a (purposefully) little-known group of Eastern European prisoners of war who the Nazis identified as perfect candidates to be the "foot soldiers of the Final Solution." They were trained at a camp in the small city of Trawniki, then deployed to various locations in Poland to ruthlessly and without question support SS guards in the murder of the two million Jews living in the country. Most notably, the Trawniki men actively participated in the largest single killing of Jews in the war's history in Lublin. Their other deplorable activities include shooting hundreds and hundreds of bodies into killing pits in Polish forests, as well as moving humans in and out of gas chambers at the killing centers of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Majdanek.
The book focuses particularly on "Citizen 865" - a Ukrainian man named Jakob Reimer - who was enrolled in the Trawniki training camp and quickly rose in the ranks due to his ruthless devotion to the "cause" - so much so that he was granted German citizenship just before war's end. However, he was able to gain U.S. citizenship in 1950, lying about his service for Nazi Germany and saying he was merely an interpreter and paymaster for Trawniki.
After WWII, the U.S. Department of Justice created the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), tasked solely with rooting out the estimated hundreds of Nazis living in the U.S. unknown and deport them back to their home countries. They couldn't charge them with criminal offenses, but they could certainly make it known that they were not welcome in this country. OSI employed both historians and prosecutors to find these individuals, but the lack of evidence available was a barrier. In OSI's early years, the public supported their work. However, a huge wave of evidence became available after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1988, held by the Soviets, giving OSI unprecedented vision into identities and crimes. Paradoxically, by this time, many of these Nazis were older, seemingly gentle and sweet old men, and at the exact moment when OSI had the evidence to deport, the public wanted them to be left alone. In the eyes of many officials in the U.S. government, including infamous Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan, there should be damn good evidence to deport citizens living "peacefully" in the U.S. for decades. But for staff at OSI, these crimes could not go unnoticed. Every day, historians and prosecutors learned of the atrocities committed by men like Jakob Reimer - and could not bear the thought of him living another day in the land of the free.
This book is immaculately written and researched, giving readers the perspective of OSI historians as well as two survivors from Lublin. It provides such a deluge of horrifying, unimaginable crimes that it simultaneously desensitizes you to the level of barbarism displayed by the Trawniki men and paralyzes you with such sadness and horror that you can almost not bear to go on. However, these stories are important and deserve to be read and recognized, particularly for a killing force that is so little known among WWII history. I highly, highly recommend this book for history lovers, both WWII and U.S., even for those who think they've read everything about the subject. If you're not interested in reading the book, there's a documentary series that just came out on Netflix called The Devil Next Door, about almost the same situation, but focusing on another man in the U.S. accused of being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka, John Demjanjuk, and the saga of his deportation as a "sweet old man," criminal trials, and the rest of his life.
Thank you to Hachette and Netgalley for the ARC.
The book focuses particularly on "Citizen 865" - a Ukrainian man named Jakob Reimer - who was enrolled in the Trawniki training camp and quickly rose in the ranks due to his ruthless devotion to the "cause" - so much so that he was granted German citizenship just before war's end. However, he was able to gain U.S. citizenship in 1950, lying about his service for Nazi Germany and saying he was merely an interpreter and paymaster for Trawniki.
After WWII, the U.S. Department of Justice created the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), tasked solely with rooting out the estimated hundreds of Nazis living in the U.S. unknown and deport them back to their home countries. They couldn't charge them with criminal offenses, but they could certainly make it known that they were not welcome in this country. OSI employed both historians and prosecutors to find these individuals, but the lack of evidence available was a barrier. In OSI's early years, the public supported their work. However, a huge wave of evidence became available after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1988, held by the Soviets, giving OSI unprecedented vision into identities and crimes. Paradoxically, by this time, many of these Nazis were older, seemingly gentle and sweet old men, and at the exact moment when OSI had the evidence to deport, the public wanted them to be left alone. In the eyes of many officials in the U.S. government, including infamous Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan, there should be damn good evidence to deport citizens living "peacefully" in the U.S. for decades. But for staff at OSI, these crimes could not go unnoticed. Every day, historians and prosecutors learned of the atrocities committed by men like Jakob Reimer - and could not bear the thought of him living another day in the land of the free.
This book is immaculately written and researched, giving readers the perspective of OSI historians as well as two survivors from Lublin. It provides such a deluge of horrifying, unimaginable crimes that it simultaneously desensitizes you to the level of barbarism displayed by the Trawniki men and paralyzes you with such sadness and horror that you can almost not bear to go on. However, these stories are important and deserve to be read and recognized, particularly for a killing force that is so little known among WWII history. I highly, highly recommend this book for history lovers, both WWII and U.S., even for those who think they've read everything about the subject. If you're not interested in reading the book, there's a documentary series that just came out on Netflix called The Devil Next Door, about almost the same situation, but focusing on another man in the U.S. accused of being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka, John Demjanjuk, and the saga of his deportation as a "sweet old man," criminal trials, and the rest of his life.
Thank you to Hachette and Netgalley for the ARC.
sbnich's review against another edition
5.0
4.5 stars, rounded up because it was 5-star book until the Reimer trial and then it lost a little of its narrative magic as real world is sometimes just not compelling dialogue.
That said, this is a wonderful read about a little known training camp whose officers led some of the greatest atrocities of the European theater in WWII. The writing is crisp and flows well. The history and actions of OSI are interwoven with the story of two Jews who are among the very few to escape that region of Poland, giving context and and emotional anchor to what could have been an academic, bureaucratic narrative.
Definitely recommend.
That said, this is a wonderful read about a little known training camp whose officers led some of the greatest atrocities of the European theater in WWII. The writing is crisp and flows well. The history and actions of OSI are interwoven with the story of two Jews who are among the very few to escape that region of Poland, giving context and and emotional anchor to what could have been an academic, bureaucratic narrative.
Definitely recommend.
inger70's review against another edition
3.0
Slow moving and horrifying. What was done to Jewish people is unthinkable. Thank god these people did what they could to make war criminals pay.