Killing the SS

After World War II, the full scale of the Third Reich's crimes comes to light, and the Nazis who carried out the genocide scatter. Heinrich Himmler, the notorious SS leader, is caught quickly. Many others slip away through an organized Nazi network built to hide them.

Among the fugitives are Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who ran medical experiments at Auschwitz, and Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary. Klaus Barbie, known as the "Butcher of Lyon", and Adolf Eichmann are also on the run.

The people who go after them call themselves Nazi hunters. They include a French husband and wife, an American lawyer who served in the army on D-Day, and a death camp survivor. A German prosecutor who once signed an oath to the Nazi Party and agents of Israel's Mossad join them.

Over decades they search across the world, and bringing a fugitive to justice often ends in that person's death. This is narrative non-fiction about espionage and pursuit, history told as a chase.

It belongs to the Killing series by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, and it moves at the quick pace of the earlier volumes. The subject is grim, and the book builds toward a final chapter meant to shock.