Citizen 865
The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America
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4.5 • 17 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
**Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Book Award Finalist**
The gripping story of a team of Nazi hunters at the U.S. Department of Justice as they raced against time to expose members of a brutal SS killing force who disappeared in America after World War Two.
In 1990, in a drafty basement archive in Prague, two American historians made a startling discovery: a Nazi roster from 1945 that no Western investigator had ever seen. The long-forgotten document, containing more than 700 names, helped unravel the details behind the most lethal killing operation in World War Two.
In the tiny Polish village of Trawniki, the SS set up a school for mass murder and then recruited a roving army of foot soldiers, 5,000 men strong, to help annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Poland. After the war, some of these men vanished, making their way to the U.S. and blending into communities across America. Though they participated in some of the most unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, "Trawniki Men" spent years hiding in plain sight, their terrible secrets intact.
In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from U.S. soil.
Through insider accounts and research in four countries, this urgent and powerful narrative provides a front row seat to the dramatic turn of events that allowed a small group of American Nazi hunters to hold murderous men accountable for their crimes decades after the war's end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Investigative journalist Cenziper (Love Wins) details American efforts to bring Nazi collaborators to justice in this gripping narrative. Established in 1979, the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations identified Nazi war criminals who had lied on their applications for U.S. citizenship. Though federal law prevented prosecutors from bringing criminal cases against defendants whose war crimes had been committed on foreign soil, they could be denaturalized and deported to stand trial in other countries. Throughout the 1980s, OSI historians found multiple references in Nazi records to the Trawniki training camp in Poland. Further details remained locked behind the Iron Curtain, however, until an investigative team visited Czechoslovakia in 1990 and discovered a roster of more than 700 Eastern and Central European volunteers who had been trained by the SS at Trawniki and took part in the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto and other atrocities. After the war, 13 "Trawniki men" led ordinary lives in the U.S. until their citizenships were revoked by the OSI. Some stood trial in Europe and Israel, others died before they could be deported. Cenziper sketches OSI investigators in broad yet deft strokes, interweaving their stories with the account of a Jewish couple who escaped Lublin. Readers of true crime and Holocaust history will be swept up by this brisk, thrilling account.)
