CITIZEN 865 : THE HUNT FOR HITLER'S HIDDEN SOLDIERS IN AMERICA
by Debbie Cenziper
After World War II, thousands of Nazi collaborators left Europe for other countries: Brazil, Argentina, the Middle East, Chile, and the United States. They slipped in hoping to make new lives. By the 1960s there was talk about these perpetrators on our shores. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and others who sought justice spent years tracking them down. It was not enough. What was needed was a much bigger operation. In 1979, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was formed. Eventually they would have more than one hundred successful cases. The most lethal one was discovered in a long-hidden document that no Western investigator had ever seen until 1990 in a basement archive in Prague.
Trawniki is a tiny village in Poland. This is where the SS set up a training camp to help them commit mass murder. They recruited 5,000 men to obliterate the Jewish population who inhabited Poland. These scumbags became the foot soldiers who did most of the dirty work. How lucky for us that many of them came to America, living here with their diabolical secrets. Fortunately, OSI had a persistent, determined team who pursued these criminals until they were caught, and then prosecuted them.
Just when you think that there is nothing new about the Holocaust, another book comes out with something that I never heard about before. Author Debbie Cenziper is an investigative journalist, professor, and author who used her sleuthing skills to write an incredible story. Her impeccable research is based on hundreds of interviews with the lawyers, prosecutors, and historians involved with OSI, talking with Eli Rosenbaum, the original director of it, reading thousands of government documents, Nazi records, transcripts of trials, articles, delving into archives from the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., plus going to Prague, Warsaw, and Lublin, Poland (this is where Trawniki is) to research their archives.
Citizen 865 is a brilliant piece of detective work, and not to be missed.
Highly recommended.
