long hours following a suspect’s friends and acquaintances, often attempting to make positive identifications with nothing more than old photographs and outdated witness testimony. Much depended on bribery, charm, guile—and patience, because most hunts took months or years.
Catching a war criminal was only the beginning. There was no guarantee an arrest would lead to a trial: in Europe, many former Nazis still held positions of power, and war crimes trials were stymied by everything from passive resistance to outright death threats. Pursuing criminals overseas was even more of a nightmare, and some teams resorted to illegal means in such cases: either a kidnapping job to circumvent extradition (Mossad’s black-bag snatch of Adolf Eichmann, bringing him from Argentina to Israel where he was tried and executed), or outright assassination (the killing of Herberts Cukurs, called “the Eichmann of Latvia,” in Brazil).
Ian and Nina Graham are fictional Nazi hunters, though they were inspired in part by the famous husband and wife team Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, whose partnership is both a moving postwar romance and an inspiring dedication to human justice—their most famous catch was Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” and they’re still tirelessly dedicated to the fight against fascism although now in their eighties. Tony Rodomovsky is also fictional, as is his Boston center and Ian’s Vienna-based one, though such centers were invaluable not just in hunting war criminals, but in documenting the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Without their work preserving witness statements and camp evidence, much information about Nazi atrocities would have been lost. Fritz Bauer, on the other hand, was a very real man: a Jewish refugee who returned to his homeland postwar and tirelessly prosecuted war criminals despite hostility from a West German government that wanted to forget its past crimes. Times have changed since those days, and in a modern Germany that has taken responsibility for its horrendous history, Fritz Bauer is now honored as one of the first Nazi hunters.
In writing The Huntress, I realized I needed a link between my team of Nazi hunters and their elusive quarry—and as soon as I read about the Night Witches, I knew I had found my link. The Soviet Union was the only nation involved in the Second World War to put women in the sky as fighter and bomber pilots, and what women they were! Products of the Soviet aviation drive of the 1930s, these young fliers were championed by Marina Raskova, the Amelia Earhart of the USSR. The day bombers and the fighter pilots (among the latter, Lilia Litviak, seen in cameo at the Engels training camp, was killed in an aerial dogfight during the war, but became history’s first female ace) eventually integrated with male personnel . . . but the night bombers remained all-female throughout their term of service and were fiercely proud of this fact.
The ladies of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment went to war in the outdated Polikarpov U-2, an open-cockpit cloth-and-plywood biplane, achingly slow and highly flammable, built without radio, parachute, or brakes. (It was redesignated the Po-2 after 1943; I was unable to pinpoint an exact date for the change, and continued to use the term U-2 for clarity.) The women flew winter and summer, anywhere from five to eighteen runs per night, relying on stimulants that destroyed their ability to rest once off-duty. They flew continuously under these conditions for three years, surviving on catnaps and camaraderie, developing the conveyor belt land-and-refuel routine that gave them a far more efficient record than comparable night bomber regiments. The women’s relentless efficiency waged ruthless psychological warfare on the Germans below, who thought their silent glide-down sounded like witches on broomsticks, and awarded them the nickname “die Nachthexen.” Such dedication took a toll: the regiment lost approximately 27 percent of its flying personnel to crashes and enemy fire. The Night Witches were also awarded a disproportionately higher percentage of Hero of the Soviet Union medals—the USSR’s highest decoration.
Nina Markova is fictional, but not her exploits. Lieutenant Serafima Amosova-Taranenko was born in remote Siberia, saw a Pe-5 perform a forced landing, and swore to become a pilot. Senior Lieutenant Yevgeniya Zhigulenko finagled her way into the training group by pestering a random colonel in the aviation department until he gave her an appointment, then refusing to leave until he referred her to Raskova. Navigator Irina Kashirina successfully made a one-armed landing, taking the stick with one hand while holding her wounded pilot off the front-cockpit controls with the other.