Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Debbie Cenziper, the Director of Investigative Reporting at Northwestern University, brings “The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America” to the Amram Scholar Series. It is the gripping story of how a tenacious team of Nazi hunters pursued those responsible for the most lethal killing operation of the Holocaust, battling over decades to remove them from American soil.

Their mission, described in Cenziper’s book, Citizen 865, grew out of the discovery of a 1945 Nazi roster in 1990 by two American historians in a basement archive in Prague. Never before seen by Western investigators, the long-forgotten document helped unravel the details of how the SS set up a school for mass murder in the Polish village of Trawniki and recruited a 5,000-man force to help annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Poland. After the war, some of these killers escaped unpunished to the United States, blending into communities across America, hiding in plain sight.

In a talk based upon her book, Cenziper tells the harrowing story of two Jewish orphans who fled from Poland to the U.S., only to learn that some of their Nazi captors had found refuge here as well. Confronted by the unyielding forces of time and political opposition, they helped Nazi hunters at the U.S. Justice Department in a fight that persists to the present day, seeking to find a measure of justice for the Polish victims of Nazi horrors.

A contributing reporter for the investigative team at The Washington Post, Cenziper is a winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award, given by Ethel Kennedy and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from Harvard University.

This program is free and open to everyone.  A Zoom link will be provided upon RSVP.
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Click here to purchase the book through WHC’s Mitzvah Mall

Presented in partnership with the Jewish Book Council.

Sponsored by: Abraham & Freida Hochberg Creative Cultural Fund.