Useful Enemies

Why did the United States take nearly sixty years to put John Demjanjuk on trial as a Nazi collaborator? This book traces the Cold War decisions that made that delay possible. American politicians and the military, driven by fear and paranoia, recruited Nazi war criminals to serve as spies and saboteurs in Europe and admitted them to the country through gaps in immigration law. That same immigration system had kept out thousands of Jewish refugees during and after the war.

Demjanjuk was a postwar immigrant who ran an auto repair business and lived quietly in Cleveland until 1977. His case is presented as the last piece of a larger pattern of government concealment. The White House, the War and State Departments, the FBI and the CIA all backed policies that sheltered Nazi war criminals and worked to hide them from investigators and from efforts to deport them.

The author also profiles those who pushed back. Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Justice Department prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum spent decades holding hearings, locating and investigating suspected war criminals, and winning convictions for visa fraud. The story reaches its conclusion with Demjanjuk's 2011 conviction in Munich for serving as an SS guard at the Sobibor death camp.

Drawing on deep research, the book follows one man's wartime past and its consequences, and examines how America gave up its moral authority in the years after the Holocaust.