has written seven historical novels, including the bestselling The Alice Network, the Empress of Rome Saga, and the Borgia Chronicles. All have been translated into multiple languages. Kate and her husband now live in San Diego with two black dogs named Caesar and Calpurnia.
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About the Book
Author’s Note
“Does INS know of any Nazi war criminals living in the United States at this time?”
“Yes. Fifty-three.”
That question was posed in 1973 by Democratic Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman in a routine subcommittee hearing, and the answer surprised her as much as it did me during my research for this novel. Had there really been known war criminals living in America since the end of the Second World War?
Yes. There just wasn’t any funding or organization to investigate them. Holtzman later pushed for the creation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, but before the OSI, any Nazi war criminal who made it to the United States had a good chance of living in peace . . . including one woman upon whom I partly based die Jägerin.
Hermine Braunsteiner was a brutal female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek, who served a brief postwar prison sentence in Europe, then married an American and became a US citizen living in Queens, New York. Her neighbors were dumbfounded when she was tracked down in 1964 and accused of war crimes, and her astonished husband protested, “My wife wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Anneliese Weber/Lorelei Vogt is a fictional composite of Hermine Braunsteiner and another woman, Erna Petri, an SS officer’s wife who during the war found six escaped Jewish children near her home in Ukraine, brought them home to feed them a meal, then shot them. Petri was tried in 1962 and given a life sentence, and Braunsteiner became the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States.
What moved these women to do such terrible things? The question is unanswerable. Petri was defensive, saying that she had been conditioned to Nazi racial laws and hardened by living among SS men who carried out frequent executions—she admitted wanting to show she could conduct herself like a man. Braunsteiner was self-pitying, weeping, “I was punished enough.” Both women faced justice, but only after a long slog of legalities and paperwork: it took seventeen years for Braunsteiner to be extradited, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. I wanted The Huntress to have a swifter climax than a decades-long legal battle, and I certainly had no wish for my fictional characters take credit from the very real journalists and investigators who brought Petri and Braunsteiner to justice, so I made the decision to create a fictional female war criminal from both women’s records.
Mention the term “Nazi hunter” out loud, and most real Nazi hunters will wince. The term conjures a Hollywood vision of pulse-pounding adventure, and the reality is very different. The first war crimes investigation teams were hard at work before the V-E Day champagne corks had even started popping; they took testimony from camp survivors and liberators, tracked the guilty down in POW camps and escape bolt-holes, and sought out the civilian murderers of downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners as well as perpetrators of the Final Solution. Men like William Denson, US Army chief prosecutor at the Dachau trials, and Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor in the trial of the Einsatzgruppen killers, were overworked heroes responsible for prosecuting hundreds. But after the Nuremberg Trials there was an overwhelming public sense of “Well, now that’s done” as far as Nazi war criminals were concerned. Even though only a tiny percentage of the guilty had been prosecuted, there wasn’t much interest in further war crimes trials—the Soviet Union had become the enemy to fear, not the defunct Third Reich. By the seventies and eighties, as the Cold War waned and people realized time was running out as World War II veterans and witnesses aged, there was a surge of renewed interest in bringing Nazis to justice, but post-Nuremberg investigation teams had a real fight on their hands.
Such teams might be government funded, run through refugee documentation centers like those begun by Tuviah Friedman in Vienna and Simon Wiesenthal in Linz, or conducted privately. There was no common strategy or agreement on tactics, and such groups often disagreed (or even feuded!) Perpetually underfunded and overextended, they tracked war criminals through the tedious cross-checking of records, wary interviews with a suspect’s neighbors or family who had no legal obligation to cooperate, and