[inaudible conversations] >> i didn't even have to say anything. you are a well-trained bunch. good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. good afternoon welcome to the illinois holocaust museum and education center. my name is lily and and is director of public programs i have the privilege on a regular basis. we thank you so much for being here with us today. we hope you'll return on other occasions. usually i play a game with her audience and i will do it very quickly. is this your first visit? please raise your hand. raise it higher so i can see it very thank you, thank you, thank you. over here too. thank you. in the interest of quality so the rest of you can exercise one of your arms if you are a regular, if you attend programs

all the time if you are one of our members please raise your hand. thank you so much. thank you. the folks who raised her hands the first time around please don't take my word for it alone. ask anyone else around you his hand without the second time why they support this institution, why they come here on a regular basis, why i know many of them by their first name. those whose first names i haven't learned i will do my best to learn them. also may suggest those of you who are not as familiar with the organization to pick up one of her quarterly calendars and brochures. you will find among the information desk. this will let you know about all of our upcoming programs. i won't take the time to list them all but i will tell you we have a program that's coming thursday evening. it's going to be an exhibition opening for brand-new exhibition

and that's on thursday the 21st and the next sunday we have another program. we have a film and discussion in ways tangentially related to the subject matter today. we'll be showing the film the memories of the eyes and row which is a documentary of survivors and others who were witnesses or who attended the eyes and trial and one of those witnesses are featured photographs in our special exhibition memories on earth the large photograph of henry roth. there are just a few of the reasons for you to return and i certainly hope you will. at the conclusion today's programmer presenter will be available to sign copies of her new book "citizen 865" the hunt for hitler's hidden soldiers in america so as a courtesy i ask you to please allow her to exit the stage and auditorium and continue your conversation with her in the vicinity of our

legacy shop. some of you may have noticed we have additional apparat i in the room today. we are very excited that this afternoon's program is being preserved and taped for future broadcast by c-span, c-span's booktv. so we are excited to have an author whose work commands such important attention as it should because the subject matter will never go out of style. me tell you a little bit about the presenter. debbie cenziper is associate professor and director of investigative reporting at brazil's school of journalism northwestern university she oversees the investigative tip -- investigative lab. she is the pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter and nonfiction author who writes for the "washington

post". she has spent three years at george washington university before joining the faculty at mcgill. over the years her investigative stories have expose wrongdoing profit congressional hearings that led to changes in federal and local laws. in her classes at medill her students focus on social justice investigative reporting. debbie is one dozens of award and a tear rare can. journalism including the robert f. kennedy award for reporting that human rights and the prize for investigative reporting from harvard university. she received the pulitzer in 2007 at the "miami herald" for a series of stories about corrupt affordable housing developers who were stealing from the poor figure before that she was a pulitzer prize finalist for her stories about dangerous breakdowns of the nation's hurricane tracking system. debbie is a frequent speaker at universities writing conferences in both events. her first book love wins, the

lovers and lawyers who fought the land marchesa on marriage equality by a million warm -- william morrow was named one of the most notable books by the "washington post." her second book hot off the presses "citizen 865" the hunt for hitler's hidden soldiers in america is a topic of conversation with us today. she is based on the medill washington d.c. campus working with students on investigative stories and we are delighted to present to you this afternoon debbie cenziper. [applause] >> thank you for that lovely introduction. i very much appreciate it. i'm so happy to be with you here today. i'm based in washington d.c. for the first quarter at northwestern.

i've been here at evanston learning about evanston northwestern in chicago and it's been a lot of fun and i'm so happy to be here to talk about this book project. let me tell you where this book got started. this book started in the final moments of 2016 when i was at a new year's eve party in maryland with my friends and my husband and my husband wanted to leave because there was very loud disco music play in the background and he had had enough. i ended up having this conversation with the woman we were having dinner with whom i had never met before. turns out she was a lawyer from the u.s. department of justice and over this long unexpected conversation robin gold started telling me about this little known unit deep inside the u.s. justice department that has spent three decades hunting nazi war criminals on u.s. soil.

she spent a decade on the staff of the "washington post." i knew very little about this woman and i remember two things, asking myself two questions after this two-hour conversation. number one how was it possible that so many gears after the war 70 some years after the holocaust there was still not the perpetrators and war criminals living here on u.s. soil. i just could not understand that and i was fascinated by the idea that was even happening and more than that who were the men and women at the u.s. justice department has spent the bulk of their careers hunting for these perpetrators and how are they able to spend day after day, year after year inside some of the darkest moments in history? how were they able to do that and then go home at night to their wives and their husbands?

how were they able to go home at night to their children, take occasions and live normal lives when during the day they were hearing about in reliving some of the most horrible horrific moments in holocaust history. i really wanted to get to know the people behind this nazi hunting unit in the u.s. department of justice. after i rounded up my husband from the cocktail party, he was sitting outside hunched over reading the "washington post" waiting for me for quite a long time i knew i had the beginnings of another book. about a week later i called up and historian who worked at in this nazi hunting unit in the u.s. department of justice dr. barry white. i asked barry to talk to me a little bit about what he had been doing here in she recounted the story that prompted me to ride this book.

in 1990, soon after the collapse of communism very white another historian named peter black, hugh already got my joke and i haven't even told you my joke yet. you already got to the punchline but they went to prague because communism had collapsed and a new the nazis had daft a lot of records and more documents nazi rosters and they could never get to them because the communist government wouldn't allow them inside their archive. after the collapse of communism in the 1990s they could get in and it was a treasure trove of information for these historians. imagine what they might find there. they flew into germany. they went to prague in the middle of the night. they ended up in a little rented apartment and the russian

caretaker was very upset that barry white was not there with her husband on the job. she was actually pregnant at the time and the russian caretaker very much wanted to see the corpse for breakfast and that was not a good thing for barry who was early on in her pregnancy. they ended up inside of this massive archive in prague surrounded by government agents with guns and everything else. dr. peter black whose translator said i am dr. black and this is dr. white and we are here representing the u.s. department of justice. all the government agents started to smirk and they are probably thinking the cia has no imagination. these must be government spies but off we go into the dusty archives in this office building

in prague. soon enough she pushes back her chair and she's looking at the paper, friends over to peter black and says i found something it turns out they found the nazi roster from 1945 that listed the name of 700 men who had participated in one of the most lethal operations in occupied poland. some of those men they knew were here in the united states living on u.s. soil. they recognize some of the names. that was a turning point in an investigation that spanned about 15 years and is at the heart of this book "citizen 865". as soon as i talked to barry white or knew that this was my next book. this was for sure a story that i wanted to tell. let me give you a little bit of

background. i focused heavily in this book on historians though prosecutors are heroes of this book as well. i focused heavily on historians because i spent 25 years of my life as an investigative reporter so i love documents. historians were able to find documents from all over eastern europe inside what were once communist countries. they went to moscow they went to kiev, they went to prague and they found all of this evidence about men who were living here in the united states. i found that absolutely intriguing as an investigative reporter that there were men and women who had spent their careers in the outpost of the u.s. department of justice with drop ceilings and stained carpeting and a window that faced mcdonald's. here they were hunting nazi war criminals in u.s. soil and they

were absolutely determined to bring them to justice no matter how much time had passed. i found that really inspiring as a journalist, as a mother, as a wife and a human being. these are the people who in part to drive the story. a little bit of background. as you all know poland had more prefer the war than any of their country in the world probably except for the united states. it was a thriving hub for jewish people. it was also considered a strategic stronghold for their rights because there was lush farmland and the strong economy that they wanted to turn over ethnic settlers. poland was a very strategic location of the very strategic area for the right.

but what do you do with the jews? they had experimented with gas in germany with mobile gas masks and that idea of the mass murder was very interesting and intriguing to the police leader a man known as ophelia to the bush neck. he was tasked with deciding what to do with the jews of occupied poland. the ss was busy fighting on the soviet front and they needed manpower. they needed help to annihilate the jews of poland and so he ended up recruiting from soviet p.o.w. camps men who were captured soviet soldiers. they were put in soviet p.o.w. camps are they likely faced

death and the actually recruited them and essentially taught them how to fight for the enemy. he also recruited lithuanians latvians poles and other recruits. he brought them to a little farming village south of warsaw. you can see from the map with censures thing about this map is it was an incredible location because it had rail lines that connected this village to other key points in occupied poland. he ultimately recruited about 5000 men to this camp. it became in a sense a school for mass murder. in this camp these men were trained in nazi ideology. they were taught military drills and marching commands and they

were alternately dispatched from the school for mass murder in this little farm village known as trust mickey to the jewish ghettos of occupied poland where they liquidated together. they were brought -- they have participated in shooting operations throughout occupied poland and they manned the killing centers in occupied poland including treblinka. the men essentially became the manpower for the ss. they were the men who did the bloodiest jobs in occupied poland and the jews who survived describes a man as more brutal and blood thirsty than members of the ss. these were men who essentially

became the foot soldiers of the third reich and it became their base. this is where they were armed, this is where they were trained and this is where they were issued deployment orders to go across occupied poland and helped the ss annihilate the jews. these were the men who did the bloodiest jobs in occupied poland and trazegnies was essentially a school for mass murder in occupied poland set up by the ss. in fact one of the historians in the book called the men of trazegnies the foot soldiers of the third reich. they were often known by the jews as the men wearing white coats and black hats. some village survivors called them ukrainian because some of the men were from ukraine or that region but there were many many others lithuania and latvia

the ss really came up with an incredible system because these men were given wages. they were given housing. they were given food. they were given service medals for work that was done well. they were given vacations. they were given all kinds of honors. for these men especially men who came from soviet p.o.w. camps serving the enemy seemed like there was a decent option because the soviet p.o.w. camp space based starvation or death or some other kind of horrible death. this camp was set up and their first deployment was a city you can see on the map. it was a historical cultural and religious center for thousands of polish jews. more than 30,000 jews lived in

poland in 1939 and they held leadership positions on the town council. they were leading members of the business community. there were religious schools. there was just a thriving, thriving jewish hub in 1939 and it was here that two of the main characters in my book matt and they were just children in many ways, in every way at the time. they were born in lubilin. they were friends and their families were friends. listen this father was an interpreter before the war and her mother was a dentist. felix's father was an architect before the war. these two teenagers were put into the lublin ghetto by the nazis along with their friends and neighbors and every member of their extended family. 40,000 jews were put into this

ghetto. there was starvation, you name it. it was terrible, water shortages, food shortages and for all kinds of reasons lucinda and felix were able to survive mass deportation in this ghetto. their survival story like all the survival stories i have heard in this book are absolutely astounding. took my breath away as a writer but here they were in this ghetto in lublin and one day men in black coats and black hats around the perimeters of the ghetto and they put on floodlights and they demanded every family come outside. in this ghetto 1600 jews a day would be deported east for resettlement in the east. over a period of weeks who send

you and felix, felix was 19 or so so everyone they knew deported, their friends, their neighbors and family. everyone they knew they lost. they didn't know where they had gone and it turns out they were taken to the killing center and gas upon arrival. the people who did this were men in black coats and black hats and the jews of lublin described him them as being more vicious and violent than the dreaded s. s.. they went to a jewish hospital and murdered physicians and doctors and nurses. they went to a jewish orphanage and murdered the children along with the staff members who refused to leave the children behind. they went into the woods and shot jews at the edge of her routine through mass killing and shooting operations. these men were the trazegnies

men who were trained at the school for mass murder. the school was so important to the ss the top leadership came to visit including hitler. felix and lucy escaped to the lublin ghetto and under the cover of night took a train to warsaw because they didn't have anyplace to go. they lived inside the jewish ghetto of warsaw because lucinia had not go there and they decided that the last minute they needed to get out of the ghetto so in the weeks before the uprising with the help of the polish underground felix and lucy escaped the warsaw ghetto and it probably saved their lives because they escaped just before the uprising. what they didn't know at the time is that the trazegnies men followed and work side-by-side with the germans to suppress the

jewish uprising in the warsaw ghetto. so they survived the lublin outran the men of trazegnies. they survived warsaw outran the men of trazegnies and lucy and felix ended up at the end of the war and a small farming village near kraków. they essentially were hiding in plain sight and felix became a teacher for the local cherlin in the village. never once told anyone obviously he was a jew. the end of the war they heard tanks rumbling towards the farm village. helix got down on his stomach and crawled out of the woods on his hands and knees and could see these soviet tanks coming, liberation, liberation and/or russian commander walked into the building and approached felix and said who are you? felix said i'm a teacher here. the commander said okay and felix said for the first time in

many many months i am also a jew the commander said to him that's not possible. all the jews are dead. you must be a spy and felix said no, no i am a jew. the commander called over a jewish soviet soldier and said you are a jew, he is a jew speaking atish or hebrew to each other. felix came from a very assimilated family and lublin it did not speak much yiddish. in fact his father brought in a rabbi to the house to teach him a little bit of this history and felix would wait until the rabbi dozed off. he would take his books get to the last page and when the rabbi woke up he would say. go i finish my studies. now he's faced with proving he is a jew in what could have been a life or death moment for the end of the war and somewhere in the back of his memory in the

back of his mind he remembered the shema the holiest prayer in jewish religion and recited it in the soviet soldier said oh my god you really are a jew. and he hugged felix and that's how felix and lucinia were able to assess how they survived, one of the ways they survived the war. on foot they went home lublin to see if anyone was left there before the war there were 40,000 jews living in lublin. only 200 survived including felix and lucinia. they need to get out of lublin because lucinia in particular every rock had a lot on it. every neighborhood was a stranger by then. they went to vienna and felix finished his medical degree and became a doctor.

in 1951 they came to united states. what they didn't know years later and what many if not most jewish of vipers didn't know years later is that the men of trazegnies followed. they slipped into the united states by lying about their whereabouts and activities during the war. they came in in large part under the displaced persons act which was meant to bring in war refugees people who were escaping from communism and jewish survivors but they moved to the united states hiding in plain sight in cities and suburbs across the country so there were trazegnies men living in new york, and florida ohio and even here in the chicago region. ultimately what investigators found at the u.s. department of justice is there were more than a dozen trazegnies men living in

the united states. imagine knowing that those very same men who persecuted and had a hand in killing everyone you ever knew were living in the united states side-by-side with holocaust victims, and their descendents and war veterans who crossed an ocean to free them. imagine what that must have felt like knowing that was the case did when they trazegnies men came here many of them became naturalized citizens. they fled to defend the constitution and they were living here with pensions and social security benefits. they went to church, they married, they had children. they were naturalized americans living side-by-side with the very same people they had been killing. people at the department of justice didn't really know very

much about trazegnies. he was known to the people in the east that not necessarily the western investigators because the department of justice and western investigators did not have access to the archives in eastern europe for a long, long time. some men were known. does jon do not yell's name ring a bell? he was a trazegnies man. that is where he was trained and that was his base camp. we knew, american investigators knew of trazegnies but they didn't understand its role in the murder of the jews of occupied poland. without the men of trazegnies according to historians there is no way the s. ask could have killed 1.7 million jews in fewer than 20 months in the span of two polish summers. there is no way they could kill

that many that quick way without root force on the front lines of this mass murder operation in occupied poland. this is one of the most interesting pictures i have found of the trazegnies men standing over the bodies of the dead in the warsaw ghetto. here they are at one of the extermination centers in occupied poland. you can see one of the guys is playing a mandolin. perhaps the most trusted trazegnies commander found living here in the united states is jacob rimer who is citizen age 65, the subject of the book. jacob rimer every time they were given a dot tag number that followed them through the war his assess identification number was 865. this is what is personnel

records look like. this was the ss personnel record required by the department of justice in its investigation. there is perhaps a familiar face to some of you. this is also his trazegnies personnel file that was uncovered by u.s. investigators. he worked for the ford motor company. jacob rimer started a potato chip franchise in new york city. one trazegnies man found in chicago years earlier worked for the crackerjack company so these men were living very ordinary lives. they look like ordinary americans again with social security cards pensions and retirement. jacob rimer retired to the little blackford house on the shoreline of lake carmel in new york and was living there essentially undetected for years and years and years.

the push to find these men and to bring them to justice is what drives this book. that is the drama behind this book. this is the roster that the historians found improv in 1990 with jacob rimer's name on it and his identification number. this is what led them to understand more about these perpetrators. this tiny unit inside the justice department faced an incredible set of challenges. for one thing they were racing against time because witnesses were growing older. survivors were growing older. when this unit was started by an act of congress in 1979 everyone thought they had done their work and a handful of years, couple of years, five years tops because surely that couldn't be that many people living here on u.s. soil. their work went on for 30 years.

they found concentration camp commandant's living here and other men who participated in the persecution of the jews and of course a subset of the people they were looking out for the men of trawniki so the first challenge they faced was racing against time to not only understand the part of the history that was the holocaust not well-known in the west but to identify men and some of them have changed their names. how do you prove what they did 70 years ago, 60 years ago? how do you do that? it was a great, great challenge to the investigators and historians and the prosecutors inside the unit of the justice department. one of the biggest challenges which is explored in the book and is fascinating to me was the political pushback the units faced by prominent people in the united states and pat buchanan

who repeatedly called the shutter this nazi unit. what is done is done, leave these old men alone or you are going to them back into the hands of the soviets. we can't trust the soviet justice and so pat buchanan and other, some prominent people pushed to shutter this unit for years. another challenge they faced as once they found these men and the de-naturalized them and they convinced an immigration judge to order them deported and removed from u.s. soil germany and austria would not take them back. they would not take them back. in fact there's a discussion recounted in the book where one of the heads of this unit says germany said we don't want to take your garbage back kind of thing. ahead of us unit said wait a minute it's your garbage. they just moved here but they

could not convince germany and austria to accept these men and to allow the united states to remove them. we couldn't force it. there is no way to do that. in 1988 a prosecutor in the office of special investigations a gunman decided to fly to austria to help the austrians, to convince the austrians to take back nazi perpetrators. michael bernstein had two young children. he lived in bethesda maryland just outside of washington and he was a storied prosecutor in this unit. he had to play a convincing ever defended on his roster to settle a case and to agree to leave this country without ever taking a guided core. he was a brilliant lawyer. austria around that time despite

existing for years and you know what navy will take some of your defendants back in austria was the only thing that we needed was a signature so michael bernstein volunteered to go. he flew to austria just before hanukkah in december 1988 and managed to get the deal done and stayed until the ink was dry even though he wanted to get home to celebrate on a call with his children because his daughter was about seven and his son was four years old. so off he goes and as he's about to come home he calls his wife and he calls his boss inside the justice department and says i really want to get home earlier and

i'm going to miss myflight and he switched it to pan am flight 103 which was blown up by a terrorist bomb over lockerbie scotland, if you remember . the bomb was stopped in baby close and inside a samsonite suitcase michael bernstein died in the line of duty from what, 40 years at that time were so after theholocaust . and so it was one of the most tragic situations faced by the people in this nazi hunting unit and to this day a picture of michael bernstein sits on the desk of eli rosenbaum who ran the unit for years and years as the top prosecutor but this pushback, not only from people like pat buchanan but from other countries was an ongoing struggle for the people of osi. so was convincing judges to de-naturalize men who looked like ordinary americans. jacob reimer, that's one of

the historians. remember doctor black and doctor white? that's doctor black, one of the world's most foremost experts on the trawniki training camps and they still joke about the doctor black doctor white thing but one of the hardest things for the prosecutors inside this office was to convince a judge far removed from the holocaust that men who looked rather ordinary should in fact be stripped of their citizenship. jacob reimer, citizen 865 was taken to court in new york in 1998 and he was wearing high top sneakers and a sweater and in fact a couple of people in the courtroom said who is the survivor and who is the nazi war criminal? it was hard to tell the difference. so many years after the war. so fighting or convincing

judges that these men should not have been here in the first place was a great challenge facedby the nazi hunters in this book . in jacob reimer's case, they knew thathe was a trusted collaborator in the training camp . he had gone to lou blend and lead a liquidation of the lubljana ghetto and he gone on to suppress the jewish uprising. so they knew all of those things but the other thing they found out about jacob reimer is underquestioning , he thought he could get away with his history, his background so he showed up in new york without a lawyer,

didn't think he needed one. he went to the us attorney's office in new york and met with a couple prosecutors from this nazi hunting unit and under questioning, he admitted he had taken part in a mass shooting operation somewhere in the woods outside of trawniki where jewish men, women and children were lined up against the edge of a ravine and shot, their bodies dumped intothe ravine , the next truckload came in and on and on it went. witnesses of shootings like this say there was essentially blood on the floor when it was done so under questioning, jacob reimer admitted to shooting at a man in the ravine pointing to his head, almost as if he wanted to be shot, he was begging for mercy. he just wanted to end it and under questioning, reimer admitted to this. i'll play you a little bitof it now . it will take a second to hear it.

>> there was something about the man who pointed to his head ayou haven't told me. did you finish him off? >> what you couldn't hear was reimer's last line which was i'm afraid so . i finished him off. >> was there somethingabout the man who pointed to his head you haven't told me ? >> so off they go to court with jacob reimer on the witness stand so now they have all the recordsincluding jthe records they found in product . they have a couple other documents about jacob reimer and they have this confession and off they go to court but again, judges resisted all the time because what they were seeing was aman who looked like anybody else . it was very hard for the unit to convince judges to de-naturalize these men.

so to tell the story, i went to four countries. i essentially retraced the steps of the historians in this book . that's jacob reimer, by the way. he's coming to court in his sneakers one day. but i was able to go to the lublin ghetto, retrace the steps. i was able to go to the concentration camp in lublin where many people from lublin were taken to die. i actually was able to see the site of a mass shooting like the kind described by jacob reimer to us investigators and i was able to go to prague and actually find the original nazi records found by doctor white eyand doctor black in 1992. they make you put on white gloves so that the oil from

your finger doesn't seep into a original documents. this book took me about three years to report and write and i really came away with a new understanding of the holocaust which i had studied in college. i had studied growing up, talked to my grandparents. i thought i knew a lot about the holocaust but a couple things struck me. the first is how many people it takes to kill so many so quickly. how many collaborators it botook. people on the ground, people who were not part of the nazi party, not members of the ss. people who probably got away with it, many many thousands of people. the syndicated columnist george will covered the jacob reimer hearing in 1992. he called them cogs in the wheel. just how many people it takes to kill. i had never really thought about that as much as i did in writing this book.

i was also really, really intrigued by how easy it was to indoctrinate the enemy in the trawniki training camp. how easy it was to turn people around and make them loyal foot soldiers. some trawniki men deserted theunit . better than to die as a good person than to liveas a killer , right? but jacob reimer and many others stayed on. jacob b reimer was given paid vacations, allowed to visit his family in the ukraine or the area of the soviet ukraine and he returned back to the trawniki training camp to continue on with his service to the ss. he was so loyal that he received citizenship in nazi germany in 1944, the end of the war he was then retired

and moved to nazi germany and lived there as a decorated war hero so i was really fascinated by the idea of choice, by whose date and who left and how easy it was to convince the enemy to fight for you. i was also really fascinated by the germany austria resistance. the last known trawniki man ordered deported from the united states was just deported in 2018, last year . the guy had lived in queens new york for 50 years on this little middle-class neighborhood that i lived in in queens new york, drawing attention, whatever, drawing socialsecurity . he had been ordered removed from the united states 14 years ago but the department of justice and state department could not find a

country willing to take him back. they had all refused. austria, germany refused which allowed this trawniki ramen to essentially live in the united states. he was stateless but hewas here . so the people in this unit desperately wanted to move them because they didn't want to allow him to die in peace on american soil . so in 2018 after 14 years of pressing foreign governments to take this man back, they finally convinced germany to take this man back and he was flown back to germany where he died a few months later at the ageof 95 . and so i asked the people inside the justice department , is this revenge? because that comes up a lot. is this revenge, this is retribution, what is this? and their response fascinated

me. their response was that these men were never ssupposed to be here in the first place. they were not supposed to get a visa. they were not supposed to be admitted intothe united states . so we're taking back what they shouldn't have had to begin with. they should not have been allowed to live here. and they're doing it because that's what -- that is our law. they're doing it because on behalf of the holocaust survivors that they were living side-by-side with four years in the united states. on behalf of the war veterans who had crossed an ocean to help free them and they're doing it on behalf of the descendents of holocaust survivors who were here. why should these men be allowed to die in peace on us soil ? iso the people inside the justice department don't consider it revenge. they consider it justice and

that even delayed justice is better than no justice atall . and that is perhaps more important now than ever, to show the rest of the world that this kind of, that war criminals have no place living on us soil and every time the people inside the justice department will question why are you going after these guys, it's been years. leave them alone, therelittle old men . barry white would say if years later we found one of the terrorist who blew up pan am 103, would we say well, 30 years has passed. let's just let him go? of course we wouldn't so why should it be any different for perpetrators of war crimes in the holocaust? why should it be any different? so they were doing this in the name of justice and they did it most successfully.

the justice department were able to prosecute more of these men from 1990 on than any other country in the world. including germany and to this day they continue to do their work although the unit has disbanded now to include war criminals from other parts of the world. guatemala and bosnia andother war-torn countries . and unfortunately they are still as busy as ever, as busy as ever doing their work so for me as a writer, i was moved and inspired by the men and women doing this work. as an investigative reporter i had spent so many years writing about government corruption and mismanagement. i worked in miami and washington, you can imagine i'm never short on stories but this was different kind of story. this was a story that even though it was about darkness and dark moments, i found a story about light.

i really found that the men and women in this book were inspiring. the story of lucyna and feliks, i remember sitting at my desk night after night listening to their account and i was so moved by the will to survive and what they went through and in fact, lucyna would go to person a god and look at her whole family filling the pew in the synagogue and say look atwhat i produced . where once there was nothing, look what i produced. i'm so honored to let you guys know that their family is here today.fe would you stand up, the family of lucyna, feliks? [applause] that is why i say

this is a story about darkness but also about light ooand i hope you'll have the chance to read the book. thanks for having me here and i'm happy to bring it toyou . [applause] >> high. the nazi files that were kept in where you said, austria? problem? why weren't they destroyed? why did the nazis keep them at all? >> i get that every booktalk that i give. the nazis did destroy a lot ofrecords obviously. the trawniki training camp

was considered almost mundane in terms of in their eyes , it was a training camp so a lot of -- so as the soviets were coming into poland, the men of trawniki and their leader escaped and one of the places they went to was prague so they likely took a y lot of their records with them and were stashed in prague but bss didn't necessarily destroy them because it was really considered a rather mundane operation, this training camp . it wasn't a high-level. >> were these people part of the school because they were terrorizing the jews whenthey came into town . these people were not part of that group, they were a different group, right? >> these were collaborators, there were not germans . but jacob reimer had been born in the ukraine in what we now know as the ukraine.

his family had migrated their years and years earlier so even though he was german, he wasn't part of germany. so there were 5000 men that they were recruits and collaborators but they were not part of the ss. a were not part of the nazi party. >> my age is going to show, i forgot the name. i assume the nazi next door, is this case, we let them in willingly and how did we correlate them? >> i did read that book and with a writer about that next week . eric switched well is the writer so he wrote about operation paperclip which was the fact that the cia let in

certain nazis. because that had been extensively written about before, i didn't focus on that. other books have been written obviously about nazi hunting, very good books about nazi hunting. i focused on the men of trawniki because nothing had ever been written to this extent about that training camp and i was fascinated with the idea that they could recruit an army of 5000 men sto do the dirtiest jobs but yes, the cia as we all know did let men in but because that had been covered before and written about, i went to different way. >> great talk so far, i look forward to buying your books for sure area and thanks for taking the picture with me before this. i was wondering, it would seem i've read accounts of the hunt for the remnants of

nazi war criminals in other books asuch as hitler's furies and it seems like many of these hunts were ineffectual and the judges weren't interested. do you think the us missed any chances? was it that the law did not permit them to prosecute any of these criminals themselves or do you think justice was necessarily served by the nearly reporting them? do you think their home countries had an interest in prosecuting them or do you think this was in many cases just another way for them to die where maybe they would have wanted to live anyway if there wasn't probably backlash after the war? >> good question and thankyou

for asking it . the people inside the justice department obviously would have liked, were a war crimes trial would have made sense but the people inside the justice department did everything that was within their power to do. everything that the constitution allowed them to do. they could not try people for war crimes on us soil because the crimes werecommitted here . the constitution didn't allow that . it would have taken a long time and great political will to change the law and they didn't have the time to read they were racing against time. people were growing older, witnesses, defendants, rysuspects so they did everything they could in civil court . they took these men and convinced judges 2-d naturalize them. to strip them of us citizenship which they shouldn't have had in the first place. then they would take them to immigration court and convince an immigration judge

judge to order them deported at this process took years. years to build these cases, pull everything together, waiting on judgments and even then, even when they had done allthat , they couldn't often remove them. a number of them were able to die on us soil because no country would accept them. all that being said, i think the people inside this unit would tell you they did everything they could and to great success to at least hold these men accountable. they did everything they could under our law, under the law. and for the historians, so the historians it wasn't just a matter of tracking these men n. it was often a matter of correcting the record of history. especially in the case of trawniki. historians knew that trawniki existed. they didn't understand its royal role in the destruction

of the jews of occupied poland. they didn't understand just how it worked so they were able to correct the record of history and find these men and hold them accountable as best they could. >> are they still prosecuting known either trawniki men or other nazi refugees, former nazi ss and whatever? known in this country, how many do they think are still in this country ? >> that's a great question and i wish they would tell me that but they don't tell us that, especially journalists until these cases are made public. i suspect there might be a couple of cases coming up but it's just a gut instinct on my part. i think the nazi hunting unit which is called the office of special investigations has become part of a bigger unit inside the justice department now with a broader mission to

flook for war criminals from other parts of the world. but we will see if there's another one. the case in 2018 had been working on for years and suddenly after 14 years overnight that trawniki man was sent back to germany. nt95 years late. >> i was wondering this whole time why they haven't been tried as war criminals and you answered that. however, in my mind and thinking of israel how they were able to try these people, people were sent to israel and they were tried there. why didn't that happen in these cases? >> that's thesecond question i get every book talk and i'm glad you asked it . my mother said the same thing. i don't think israel had great interest in taking back these men. there were not necessarily israeli witnesses.

they did take back john demyanyuk. he was accused of being named ivan the terrible, accused of being ivan the terrible of the treblinka death camps, vicious man . and he was found guilty in israel so israel did take demyanyuk back, found give guilty in israel. the case unraveled. he was a troubling key man and he didserve in a death camp, just not be troubling to death camp . also in occupied poland. the israelis knew this and declined to prosecute. so john demyanyuk was allowed to come back into the united states, returned to his life here even though he had served in the soviet board death camp until the nazi hunting unit decided to

prosecute him a second time which was a hugehurdle . unthe head of the nazi hunting unit eli rosenbaum had to go to catalina, the attorney general at the time and ask for permission to take this case against demyanyuk back to court a second time. they successfully prosecuted him a second time. germany took him back and he was convicted in the murder of 27,000 or so jews in the soviet board death camp but to answer your question, israel did take him back. there was not a lot of interest from israel over the years to take back more . there just wasn't. >> when their citizenship was taken away from them, how did they live? were they entitled to get social security, to get medicare? how can they support themselves and take care of themselves ?

>> they were stripped of their citizenship and eventually here, considered stateless men but they were still here. they were stillpart of the country, still paying mortgages, still drawing pensions, all ofthose things . >> all their privileges continued . as if nothing happened . >> that's why it was the single greatest frustration stateside, this nazi hunting unit for years is they did all this work , prove their cases to the point where judges and in some cases these cases were appealed to ed appellate courts up to the us supreme court so court after court would affirm these decisions. yes, this man is a nazi war criminal and yet they couldn't remove them from us soil in somecases. in other cases they did but in a number of cases they struggled to the point where the men were able to die here .

>> have there been any studies about into the personalities of these men, into the backgrounds of these men because you describe them as being brutal beyond the brutal and so, even worse than the ss. >> that's a generalization but you remember a lot of them came from ancient european countries and anti-semitism for generations before the war had been ingrained in their society. so a lot of them were more brutal than the ss and the jews of occupied poland in large part came to fear them more than the ss . they were also far greater in number . the ss staff the killing centers but really the trawniki men, they were boots

on the ground. they were the ones that operated the gaschambers, that forced jews from the trains directly into the gas chambers . at so that more and treblinka and bell zach, i always pronounce it because you can't do the polish thing but they were not concentration camps, they were death camps. they were termination centers. they didn't have barracks because jews didn't stay alive there. they were taken from the train into the gas chambers because the trawniki men were doing that work so jacob reimer said in courtthat he was a victim of the nazis . that like so many others said that. that he had to fire at the man pointingto his head in the ravine because if he didn't show loyalty to the ss he would have been the next one shot .so what the department of justice argued in that case is yes, but

you've got for servicemetals. you did so well that you were granted citizenship in nazi germany. he received paid vacations . you came back on your own accord to continue fighting alongside the ss. you could have deserted but you didn't and that was their case. whydid do it ? some men deserted trawniki. they did not come back but reimer and 5000 or so others stayed on and they served with great loyalty. [inaudible] i don't know. i think they did but by and large it was not a huge number of people that deserted , not a huge number. a lot of these men afterthe war because they had come from the soviet union , they were tried by the soviets after the war and convicted by the soviets of fighting for the enemy. we just didn't know that because we were talking to the soviets about these things and it took years and

years for american investigators to realize that the soviets themselves had prosecuted trawniki men and when we were able to get our hands on those records, it helped build cases here in the united states. >> i forgot the name of the american nazi hunting unit . >> office of special investigations. >> it's been around a long time but do you know how many people were in this office of special investigations ?ee >> for the work they did, it was tiny. 40, 50 people or so. they started osi with investigators, more like criminal investigators, gun and badge men worked inside the federal government but ultimately they started using historians because they realized they desperately needed that kind of context but for many years, we didn't really do a lot of nazi hunting in the united states.

it took until the 70s for there to be political will to do this kind of work . >> debbie, thank you for your work. how did we learn from history here? how do we generations not allow massmurderers to only have the risk of citizenship being stripped ? we've got to figure something out. there has to be justice in the world beyond whatthere is . >> that is a profound question that i think we could all talk about four hours .ha i think the first step is to show that we draw the line and that no matter how many years have passed in this country, you will be stripped of your citizenship if we find out you're a war criminal. so the people in the office of special investigations, especially the lawyers spend

their whole careershere. they could have gone on to more lucrative careers, it's not fun to be a federal servant . eli rosenbaum has a law degree from harvard. they've spent theirwhole lives working in this town government office . they had emice crawling across the floor. these were not high profile prosecutors that were making headlines in the new york times and the washingtonpost and they did this work because they were on , they felt it was the right thing to do and that there has to be a line no matter how many years have passed, we're going to come after you if we find out that you have done something wrong no matter how many years have passed but i don't know about how do we prevent it in the future. one of the more depressing thoughts to me is that this unit is just as busy as ever. >> i was struck by because i've listened to you twice now listening to your comments having gone back to polandhow it took a country , not just an army. could you comment on that?

the people, it took the people, all of poland. >> i'm sure many of you have been to poland, i would imagine many people here have been to poland. it was my first visit to poland and i found poland to be a very wounded country. it was occupied by the germans and then by the soviets and there were a lot of people in poland. the polishunderground that helped save jews . including lucyna and feliks. therewere people who helped and a lot of people who collaborated . reallywounded country . >> maybe i can shed some slight about how some of these war criminals and characters can enter these countries. i am a survivor, liberated from now thousand and auschwitz and after i was liberated, 15 years old and i

was dumped into a displaced persons camp and the displaced person camp not only had displaced people who were jewish but they were ge dumped together with all kinds of other people who never had a country to go to. it took a while for the commander or of the occupied forces of america to finally comes to grips with them and separate the true displaced persons from the ones who tried to hide and i remember for i was allowed to come to america it took me three or four years of venting by cid and the cic, carefully we had to get papers, all kinds of documents from the americans, my relatives here before i was allowed to come to america and i'm sure that. [inaudible]

>> he was saying in a displaced persons camp he was that it very carefully but you were saying that probably a lot of people that participated that manage to slip in. in jacob reimer's case, the book is called citizen 865, that is ss issued id number. jacob reimer was that it by the military, u.s. army and he actually listed on his immigration papers that he had served in trawniki. this training camp but we ydidn't know what trawniki was at the time. u.s. army investigators had no idea that trawniki was a school for mass murder in occupied poland. jacob reimer was given a recommendation by a red cross supervisor at the time. he had spent the postwar years in munich chauffeuring

american gis to hollywood movies at night. he actually worked for the us army so he came in with this red cross supervisor recommendation called him something like a loyal and honest and hard-working man who would make a great american a great us citizen. so your point, you're right. they just didn't know enough to let him in, despite that kind of betting because he was that it area and then here when he was in the united states, and us investigators caught on him, he said yes. i was at trawniki i was just a paymaster in the camp administration area no blood on my hands every monday work . and the us department of justice didn't know any better until they started investigating trawniki and figured out whatthat camp actually was .

>> you said our state department was reticent about getting involved, what's your perspective onthat ? what did you learn? >> the justice department couldn't necessarily do official channels go to other countries and say you're not back. they were relying on the state department to do it, that's the state department's job and no i don't have an opinion on this, i think people inside the tjustice department might saysome years the state department pushed harder than others . but i will say from my reporting that last yearin 20 , the state department and justice department came together to deport this nazi war criminal in queens new york but for a long time i think the apartment of justice will tell you they couldn't get as much traction as they would have wanted to get for the state department area for better. >>.

>>. >> we our government then allowed to come here and the truth of the matter is that our government recruited nazis to come here knowing they're not the camps to help in the cold war, people who were scientists and other, and they not only allowed but brought them here knowing what they had done and that is something. >> for those of you who didn't hear, this woman was talking about the fact that the us government, cia and recruited not the scientists to come here after the war and that is incredibly outrageous. i hear what you're saying. this book focused on a

totally different thing. but i understand your point. >> ligament, i know we could stay here the rest of the day asking questions but i think some of your questions will be answered in her book.i do want to thank you for being here with us today to join me once again impacting debbie. >>. [inaudible] >> over the years book tv has covered several offer officers. here's a portionof one of them . >> first the president said well, there are no first-hand witnesses to this. it's all hearsay.

then there were first-hand witnesses who defied the president's orders came testified for people who heard the phone call but been . so that's been crumbled and it also crumbled of course, the reason there are no first-hand witnesses is because he was guidingthem all . he said they're not allowed to the bravery of people like doctor hill and then men and others justified so that falling apart. he then said well, this is not about fighting corruption which is a weird argument because trunk right before it cut the budget for fighting corruption in the ukraine and when asked was there any other place in the entire world in and in which you cared about corruption, hundred 94 countries. nowhere else in the entire world. this is the one magical place here to care aboutcorruption was the place in which his chief political rivals son had an interest . then finally the new one

which is being spun in yesterday's house report is that ukraine was a really corrupt country and we couldn't give that aid to ukraine it was so corrupt. there are two problems with this. number one, the trump administration just before the age cut off and certified that ukraine was not corrupt and could receive the aid so that was an official determination administration as opposed to a determination by rudy giuliani and number two, think about . if the claim is ukraine isa corrupt country , why do you pick up the phone and call that corrupt country and ask them to launch an investigation into the united states citizen ? the very fact that it was corrupt was part of the attraction, not the thing that they were trying to avoid. that's why they were doingit . so that one has fallen out.

now the other one is the impeachment process is unfair. trump doesn'thave due process . that one is a tough one for him to make and it's tough because the way in which the architecture of the constitution works, the house of representatives impeachment game is like the grand jury phase in a criminal investigation so trump is complaining why lawyers don't get to participate even though they've been invited to but saying i don't get all those protections so that's true also on the criminal side. so absolutely you've got a right to be present in the criminal trial and to testify and to cross-examine witnesses and tell your story. absolutely. just as you doif you're indicted but that's on the senate side . they don't have all the process that occurs then. >> to access all of the c-span and the book tv

archives, visit our website c-span.org/impeachment. >> watching book tv on cspan2 with top books and authors every weekend. book tv, television for serious readers . >> here's a look at some authors who recently appeared or will be appearing soon on book tvs "after words", our weekly author interview program includes best-selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. last week , peggy borenstein examined the role of sex in the lives of young men. coming up, andrea bernstein will chronicle the trump and kushner families rise to prominence. and this weekend on "after words", and sometimes on this cnn analyst ronna newhart argues thatcompanies are failing the public . >> silicon valley has a real problem. they're very good at taking

credit for the wonderful things they do and they've given up all this terrific technology and entertaining, productivity enhancing to a certain extent but they're not so good at taking responsibility for the downside and not so great at admitting that they didn't do it all themselves. these qualities were basically built on federally funded r&d. the internet. touchscreen theology, gps read these were things that came out of the pentagon . player funded darpa innovations that were commercialized by the valley. and so you have very similar styles, you have this privatization of profit that socialization of bosses in so many ways. >> "after words" airs saturdays at 10 pm sundays at 9 pm eastern and pacific on book tv on cspan2. all previous "after words" romance are available as podcasts and watch online booktv.org.