September 30, 2019
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. Agent: Joelle Delbourgo, Joelle Delbourgo Assoc.
October 11, 2019
This latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cenziper (Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality) begins by profiling Lucyna and Felix, who survived the Holocaust in Poland and immigrated to America in the 1950s. The second narrative focuses on the historians and lawyers of the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) who tracked down SS men who trained at Trawniki camp, some of whom came to the States around the same time as Lucyna and Felix. Yet the central figure here is Jacob Reimer, the Citizen 865 of the title, as are the efforts of the OSI to strip these Nazis of their U.S. citizenship, with Cenziper providing fascinating insight into the personalities, motivations, and procedures of the OSI prosecutors who successfully exposed (after some missteps) men such as John Demjanjuk and Reimer. The accounts of Lucyna and Felix, whose families were murdered by alumni of the Trawniki training camp, are told with a great deal of empathy, but unfortunately, these two main threads never manage to meet in the book. VERDICT A general purchase recommended for public libraries.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from November 1, 2019
Shedding their uniforms as Germany fell to Allied troops, some Nazi SS officers blended into the mass of refugees. Lying about their wartime whereabouts, they received American citizenship. Nevertheless, some intrepid lawyers and historians working in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations doggedly pursued those whom Holocaust survivors had identified as concentration camp guards or officers. After theaSoviet Union collapsed, archives in former Iron Curtain countries opened up, and a team of determined investigators found personnel records from Trawniki, a little-known SS training camp in a tiny Polish village. Cenziper tells the story of these investigators' horrifying discoveries of a naturalized American who had been instrumental in mass murder. She follows the story of one such man and several young Polish Jews who outran the police and survived the war. Once this former SS officer had been identified, high U.S. government officials tried to block the investigation, believing these criminals no longer worth prosecuting and deporting. With much human interest, Cenziper draws out all the implications for principles of justice for victims and perpetrators of unspeakable crimes. Includes a map and bibliographic notes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)