Summary
Summary
A Newsweek Best Book of the Year: "Captivating . . . rooted in first-rate research" ( The New York Times Book Review ).
In this New York Times bestseller, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis--from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich--who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives.
Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war "refugees." But some had help from the US government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler's minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. Now, relying on a trove of newly disclosed documents and scores of interviews, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau reveals this little-known and "disturbing" chapter of postwar history ( Salon ).
Author Notes
Eric Lichtblau is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times and has written about legal, political, and national security issues in the capital since 1999. He was the co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his stories in the New York Times disclosing the existence of a secret wiretapping program approved by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. He was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times for fifteen years before joining the New York Times in 2002. A graduate of Cornell University, he is the author of Bush ' s Law: The Remaking of American Justice , which one reviewer called " All the President's Men for an Age of Terror." In the course of research for The Nazis Next Door , he was a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. He lives outside Washington with his wife and children.
Reviews (1)
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Until recently, public perception has been that only a small number of Nazis settled in the United States after World War II. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lichtblau's (New York Times) thoroughly riveting account demolishes this myth by revealing the backstory of how and why as many as 10,000 Nazis arrived postwar on America's shores. Through interviews and archival research, the author demonstrates the involvement of the military, the CIA, and the FBI in turning these World War II enemies into Cold War allies in the fight against communism by scrubbing their wartime histories, assisting them in gaming the immigration system to gain residency and citizenship, harnessing their knowledge to fight the Soviet Union, and shielding them from investigations. Lichtblau documents the lengths to which federal agencies would go to protect these assets. In one instance, congressional members derailed an immigration service investigation into the chief scientist of NASA's aerospace medical division, Hubertus Strughold-a man who had knowledge of many human experiments performed on prisoners in concentration camps. Rich in detail, this work is a necessary corrective to our understanding of postwar American history. VERDICT An essential read for all those interested in World War II, the Cold War, and 20th-century history.-Chris Sauder, Round Rock P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.