Author: Andrew Nagorski

Andrew Nagorski is an award-winning journalist and author who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek. From 2008 to April 2014, he was vice president and director of public policy for the EastWest Institute, an international affairs think tank. Nagorski is now based in St. Augustine, Florida but continues to travel extensively, writing for numerous publications. Both of his most recent books — Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and The Nazi Hunters (Simon & Schuster, 2016) — have received rave reviews.

From January 2000 to July 2008, Nagorski served as senior editor for Newsweek International, handling the editorial cooperation between the parent magazine and its expanding network of foreign language editions and other joint venture partners. The new magazines that were launched during his tenure were Newsweek Arabic in 2000; Newsweek Polska, which has become Polands leading newsmagazine since it was launched in 2001; Newsweek Russia in 2004; and Newsweek Argentina in 2006. Nagorski also continued to write reviews and commentaries for Newsweek International. He has been honored three times by the Overseas Press Club for his reporting.

As Berlin bureau chief from 1996 to 1999, Nagorski provided in-depth reporting about Germany’s efforts to overcome the legacy of division, the immigration debate, and German-Jewish relations. From Berlin, Nagorski also covered Central Europe, taking advantage of his long experience in the region and his knowledge of Polish, Russian, and German.

From 1990 to 1994, he served as Newsweek’s Warsaw bureau chief, and he has served two tours of duty as Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief, first in the early 1980s and then from 1995 to 1996. In 1982, he gained international notoriety when the Soviet government, angry about his enterprising reporting, expelled him from the country. After spending the next two and a half years as Rome bureau chief, he became Bonn bureau chief.

From 1978 to 1980, Nagorski was the Hong Kong-based Asian regional editor for Newsweek International and then as Hong Kong Bureau Chief. After joining Newsweek International in 1973 as an associate editor, he was its assistant managing editor from 1977 to 1978.

In 1988, Nagorski took a one-year leave of absence to serve as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. In recent years, he has also served as an adjunct professor at Bard College’s Center for Globalization and International Affairs, teaching a course on international affairs writing. He is chairman of the board of the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Overseas Press Club.

In 2009, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski presented Nagorski with the newly created Bene Merito award for his reporting from Poland about the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. In 2011, Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski awarded him the Cavalry Cross for the same reason. In 2014, Poland’s former President and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa presented the “Lech Walesa Media Award” to Nagorski “for dedication to the cause of freedom and writing about Poland’s history and culture.”

Aside from Hitlerland and The Nazi Hunters, Nagorski is the author of the non-fiction books: Reluctant Farewell: An American Reporter’s Candid Look Inside the Soviet Union (New Republic/Henry Holt, 1985); The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe (Simon & Schuster, 1993); and The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II (Simon & Schuster, 2007). The New York Review of Books described The Greatest Battle “as a new and beautifully researched account of what had been a poorly understood part of the war.” His first novel, Last Stop Vienna (Simon & Schuster, 2003) about a young German who joins the early Nazi movement and then is propelled into a confrontation with Hitler, was on the Washington Post’s bestseller list.

Nagorski taught social studies at Wayland High School in Massachusetts before joining Newsweek. Born in Edinburgh of Polish parents (who shortly after his birth emigrated to the United States), he attended school overseas while his father was in the U.S. foreign service. He earned a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1969 and studied at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

Nagorski and his wife, Christina, have four children: Eva, Sonia, Adam and Alex.

The Nazi Hunters

The Nazi Hunters

The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski
Published by Simon & Schuster on May 10th 2016
Pages: 416
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

“[A] deep and sweeping account of a relentless search for justice.” —The Washington Post
More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi Hunters is drawing to a close as they and the hunted die off. Their saga can now be told almost in its entirety.
After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. The Nazi Hunters focuses on the small band of men and women who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten—and who were determined to track them down to the furthest corners of the earth.
The Nazi Hunters reveals the experiences of the young American prosecutors in the Nuremberg and Dachau trials, Benjamin Ferencz and William Denson; the Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn, who handled the case of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; Germany’s judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who repeatedly forced his countrymen to confront their country’s record of mass murder; the Mossad agent Rafi Eitan, who was in charge of the Israeli team that nabbed Eichmann; and Eli Rosenbaum, who rose to head the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations that belatedly sought to expel war criminals who were living quietly in the United States. But some of the Nazi hunters’ most controversial actions involved the more ambiguous cases, such as former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s attempt to cover up his wartime history. Or the fate of concentration camp guards who have lived into their nineties, long past the time when reliable eyewitnesses could be found to pinpoint their exact roles.
The story of the Nazi hunters is coming to a natural end. It was unprecedented in so many ways, especially the degree to which the initial impulse of revenge was transformed into a struggle for justice. The Nazi hunters have transformed our fundamental notions of right and wrong. Andrew Nagorski’s book is a richly reconstructed odyssey and an unforgettable tale of gritty determination, at times reckless behavior, and relentless pursuit.

Nagorski’s Nazis Hunter’s story picks up after the Nuremberg trials.  The official search for Nazis waned, partly because we became obsessed with the communists and partly because we felt that Germany just needed to get on with its healing from its reign of terror.

For some reason I thought that most of the war criminals of WWII were arrested and prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials, this appears not to have been the case.  Nagorski book covers some of the men and women that continued to search for war criminals well into the twenty-first century.

The book serves to remind us that we can never forget what happened and that we should bring to justice those that abuse their powers.