Customer Reviews

Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice

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On May 9, 1945, the Russian Army that liberated the concentration camp Waldenburg, in Germany, announced: "We are giving you three days of absolute freedom to rape, to steal and to kill Germans. We have full empathy for your suffering, because we have lost 22 million of our people." The Russians fervently derided the Nazis; they were vengeful. I did not go out to kill Germans. I was a desiccated mass of bones and skin. I was then more dead than alive. Furthermore, had I been well, I could not have killed anybody. I remembered my father's adages:" Hate hatred, Shun violence! You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge (Leviticus 19:18)." I was definitely not vengeful! I was grateful that the Germans did not succeed, during the Holocaust, in debasing my inherited values, which were instilled in me during the formative years of my life. The Nazis damaged my constitution but could not destroy it. I asked God to enable me to live in a peaceful world among the righteous and not to have to face the wicked again.

I have not been aware of any killing of Germans by my liberated co-inmates. Therefore, I am surprised to hear, from Guy Walter, that some survivors were not just hunting Nazis in order to bring them to trial, but took the law into their own hands. "There were Jews who did murder their former oppressors" (p.101). I am wondering if wreaking vengeance on Germans alleviated the liberated Jews' physical and mental pains. It definitely did not bring back to life their loved family members.

It is however very disturbing to me that some thirty thousand Nazi war criminals got away with murder. Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, Martin Bormann, and so many other murderers succeeded to have many years of a pleasant life, after the war. They settled in hospitable Argentina, Peru and other South American countries. Egypt, Syria, Italy, Spain and even the Vatican were accommodating fugitive Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. According to the recent report"Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War", American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators. The Americans helped Klaus Barbie to escape to Bolivia. Tracking and punishing war criminals were not high among the Army's priorities in late 1946. In 1952, the C.I.A. moved to protect Mykola Lebed, a Ukrainian nationalist leader, from a criminal investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He would work for American intelligence in Europe and the United States through the 1980s, despite being implicated in guerrilla units during the war that killed Jews and Poles and being described by an Army counterintelligence report as a "well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans."

HUNTING EVIL is a monumental work; an in-depth researched one. It brings to light how evil Nazis and other unsavory characters that had committed atrocities in WWII found havens after the war. Many of those who escaped justice had been instrumental in implementing the Holocaust and other massacres like the murder of thousands of Slavs, Gypsies and Jews in Croatia.

I wish Guy Walters would have focused more on Simon Wiesenthal's accomplishments rather than on his self-aggrandizement and misinforming. Some contradictory details could have been attributed to Wiesenthal's unreliable memory rather than to fabrication. When Solomon became king of the Israelites, God told him to ask for what he wanted, and He would grant it (Kings 3:5, 7-12). Solomon asked for an understanding heart, to know how to distinguish right from wrong.

HUNTING EVIL is thoroughly gripping. Mr. Walter deserves credit and appreciation for his efforts to collect so much valuable information for the benefit of historians and future generations. At the conclusion of Klaus Barbie's trial, Serge Klarsfeld said: "Because memory is related to justice, it means that the children of Izieu will not die away in memory. They will not be forgotten." Teaching the Holocaust legacy and its intrinsic lessons will hopefully be beneficial to all ages and so will Waltes's HUNTING EVIL.

All perpetrators of Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie's ilk should have been brought to trial for the sake of justice. The British paper, The Sun, called for "Hunt and Punish the Nazi War Criminals" I would have rephrased it; Hunt them, catch them and bring them to trial.

When an author chooses to write a book, s/he obviously needs to select a focus for the work. This is an obvious statement but points to a central problem in "Hunting Evil." Mr. Walters appears to have a dual purpose here. He wishes to recount the struggle to bring war criminals to justice which he does admirably. But, Mr. Walters also very clearly wishes to "set the record straight" about the shortcomings of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Although a work examining the record of Mr. Wiesenthal would be a necessary corrective to the image of "St. Simon," Mr. Walters near obsession with Wiesenthal muddles his book and frankly makes the author appear shrill. For example, in his chapter recounting the capture of Adolf Eichmann, Walters takes a long detour to recount how Wiesenthal attempted to take credit for this the most famous of war criminal captures. It ruins the flow of the narrative. This unfortunately happens repeatedly in the book. Mr. Walters research was admirable. His focus on Wiesenthal should have been saved for his next book.

I have read three of the author's fictional works; The Traitor, The Leader and The Occupation, as well as, his nonfiction account, Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. Obviously he is deeply fascinated with Nazi Germany and its continued influence on history (and fiction). Hunting Evil updates work such as Blowback by Simpson, Unholy Trinity by Aarons, The Real Odessa by Goni, amongst others.

Where Walter's work differs is in his condemnation both of the existence of ODESSA and the debatable contributions of Nazi Hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. The stories of Eichmann, Stangl, Mengele, Kaltenbrunner, and Barbie are provided in solid detail but with no real new material. As is the rather spotty follow-up by the Allies of war crimes and the various ratlines meant to secret individuals to safe bastions. The book attempts to break new ground and be provocative but ends up a solid aggregation of previous research.

I will Guy Walters his due, he does set out to tell an interesting story and separate fact from fiction. The sad fact is that he doesn't do a good job of it and we are left with Hunting Evil. The part of the story which is interesting is when he details how fugitive war criminals were able to flee Germany at the end of the war and how the governments in the mid-East and Latin America helped to facilitate it. The book begins to fall apart when he begins to grind his ax against Simon Wiesenthal. The criticisms of him seem to be of a personal nature and ruin his impartiality. Also, I can't believe he criticizes Wiesenthal more so than the American and British intelligence services who hired the Nazi's as intelligence assets knowing full well what they had done.

The post WWII searches for the Nazi's is OK at best but it almost seems an after thought. He is more interested in finding fault and settling scores than in telling a compelling story. This would have been an amazing story if there had been less editorializing and more work on writing history!

With the end of the Second World War, there was much that had to be repaired, and among the human repairs that were needed was hunting the former Nazis that joined the teeming displaced masses. There is a perception that there was a postwar Nazi network "Odessa," the members of which were pursued by determined investigators like Simon Wiesenthal. It all fits into our sense of justice, and unfortunately it is mostly untrue. Yes, the victors did have efforts to bring the former Nazis to justice, and they are chronicled by historian and journalist Guy Walters in _Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped & the Quest to Bring Them to Justice_ (Broadway Books). But Walters says that he learned so much about what actually happened, so much that was scandalous and infuriating, that he almost called his book _Hunting Evil (Or Not)_. While justice was done in some big cases, it was delayed in many others, and delayed sometimes until the former Nazis had lived out their lives in full. Often they were helped by the Catholic Church or by nations who were glad to get their help in fighting one side or the other of the Cold War. And sadly, Simon Wiesenthal, regarded by many as a hero in the hunt, played a consequential role in only a few captures, while boasting that he had been instrumental in hundreds. Walters's book has excitement in it, as it describes some of the hunts that were eventually successful. More often, it is a necessary but disheartening account of how far from the ideal was the search for Nazi criminals. The decades have rolled on and the hunt is over; _Hunting Evil_ is an important summary of how justice was done, and in many cases was not.

There were loose organizations that helped former Nazis out of Europe, though they were nothing like the Odessa organization that was imagined by Frederick Forsyth in the book and resultant movie _The Odessa File_. There were ways that former Nazis did get to South America, for instance, but it was by haphazard efforts. It is astonishing how many of these efforts were aided by the Catholic Church. Adolf Eichmann wrote: "It was odd how throughout my escape journey I was helped by Catholic priests... In their eyes, I was just another human being on the road." It was not only church officials who did what they could to help the former Nazis and keep them from trial or punishment. The governments after the war found that there was little political will to spend effort and money to try the thousands of war criminals who deserved trials. Friedrich Buchardt, for instance, may have been responsible for 100,000 deaths, but got post-war paychecks from Britain's MI6, and later aided the Americans, and instead of being hung, he died quietly in his bed forty years after the war. There are many distressing pages in Walters's work, for he has to detail the crimes for which these former Nazis were hunted (or should have been). The lack of motivation of the Allies to ensure justice, too, is disheartening. The most surprising and disappointing revelations, though, are about Simon Wiesenthal, who was a media focus as a Jewish seeker of vengeance, and whom many knew as "The Man Who Never Forgets." He is celebrated as some sort of secular saint, and got plenty of awards and was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize. Walters shows, and shows conclusively, that Wiesenthal invented much of his own autobiography and exaggerated his achievements. "Wiesenthal's reputation is built on sand. He was a liar, and a bad one at that." Wiesenthal claimed, for instance, that the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 was his greatest triumph, but in documenting the story of the capture here (and it is an exciting part of the book), Walters shows that Wiesenthal contributed slightly and the contribution was more of a hindrance to the Mossad agents, not a help. Wiesenthal inexcusably hounded a Polish immigrant, Chicagoan Frank Walus, for collaboration with the Gestapo and other crimes; no such crimes had occurred, and Walus got a payment and an apology from the US government. He never recovered his reputation, however, and Wiesenthal and his organization just kept quiet about ruining it.

Walters allows that Wiesenthal did provide essential help in a dozen or so captures, but not the 1,500 he claimed. He allows also that Wiesenthal had the enthusiasm to work on the right team when many others who could have prevented injustice were letting former Nazis go. Wiesenthal also provided a focus for the world to think that justice was being done. The beginning epigram for _Hunting Evil_, however, is from Petronius: "_Mundus vult decipi_" - "The world wants to be deceived." I take it that Walters deliberately left off the last part of Petronius's sentence, "_...ergo decipiatur_," which adds: "so let it be deceived." The book is a study of deceptions on the part of Nazis, governments, church officials, and Nazi hunters; if the world wants to be deceived about them, it will be only despite the revelations in _Hunting Evil_.

The book started off well enough but it quickly lost focus. This seems to be a trends in books where journalists attempt to write about history. The book is just as much about discrediting Simon Wiesenthal as it is about fugitive Nazis. While this may be deserved (I don't know and I don't care), it seems to me to be a topic for a different book. The author re-trods a lot of familiar ground--Eichmann, Mengele, Bormann, Barbie--but does cover some (for me) new material as well. The discussion about ODESSA was interesting. Overall, however, the books was unsatisifying.

Not terrible but not recommended.

Ok, we get it, Wiesenthal was an obnoxious baffoon. You don't agree with his methods, tactics and how he presented his findings or lack thereof. But do you really need to spend the entire book, which, according to the synopsis, is about escaped Nazis, on how Wiesenthal was this and how Wiesenthal was that. Just write a book called "Wiesenthal, the fake Nazi hunter" and get it over with.

It is a pity, because the author had obviously conducted great research on the subject, interviewed main protagonists and it all came down to name calling and finger pointing.

Therefore, I wouldn't be using this book as a resource on ex-Nazis.

Equal parts Wiesenthal bashing, snarking at other nazi hunters, history of nazi hunting. Only that last topic is interesting. Plus while he "sets the record straight" by debunking what he calls speculative myths he speculates more than a little. It's not really about nazi hunting, it's about what pissed him off when he researched nazi hunting.

why a review at all, the book's strengths and weaknesses demand it. the book needs focus. there is no overall theme, its not about one person, and does not have the necessary framework to be an overall study of nazi-hunting. the author chooses to follow three cases intently, eichman, mengele and klaus barbie. you will learn something from the details about these cases you do not know. there are tangents into the allies use of nazi informants and Weisenthal. i thought the Weisenthal material was well-sourced and intriguing, so yes, i was interested, but perhaps too much. also thought the documented search for Mengele, long after he was dead is amusing, in a cynical way. well researched book that could use more focus. not about 1 case, not about all cases, stuck in the middle.

Nazi hunting is a fascinating topic, and one very well addressed by Guy Walters in "Hunting Evil". The book is well researched and extremely well written. One of my favorite sentences (Page 273), "...is the worst kind of misapplied a posteriori thinking and borders on casuistry." Bravo! And Walters' dry wit is wonderful and refreshing -- not what one would expect, given that his chosen topic is anything but inherently funny. Some salient examples:

When referring to a potboiler, "Act of Violence", Walters observes "Although Bormann does not appear, there is a satisfying fight with a giant ape [Page 343]."

In referencing the movie, "Commando Mengele", the notorious doctor is protected by "...an army of tight-trousered bodyguards [Page 366]...." and "Mengele's experiments involve injecting women with the fetuses of chimpanzees, which appears to result in little more than the women growing unfeasibly large eyebrows [Page 366]...."

Mengele's autobiography is "...a monumental work of narcissism that featured forty pages alone on his birth, and one-and-a-half pages on his placenta [Page 367]."

A couple of negatives. First, Walters really sticks it to Simon Wiesenthal. He deserves it, to be sure (what a mountebank!), but Walters carries on in an almost obsessive manner. Second, he seems to have it in for the Catholic Church, and I've had it with "socially acceptable" anti-Catholic rants.

I wonder how many more books on Nazi hunting will be written. It's all become rather academic, hasn't it? Does anybody still say they want to hunt Nazis? It's akin to expressing interest in joining an order of Teutonic knights. After all, how many of the bastards are still alive? And of those who are, the youngest must be 90! No, it's a door that's closing. Read "Hunting Evil" before that door shuts completely.