Her book is citizen 865. [inaudible conversations] i didnt even have to say anything. You are a welltrained bunch. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon and welcome to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and education center. My name is Lillian Polus Gerstner and is director of programs i get this privilege on age regular basis. We thank youou so much for being here with us today. We hope you would return on other occasions. Usually i play a game and dont do it very quickly. Is this yourt first visit . Lees raise your hand. Rate it higher so i can see. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Our presenter must have a knack. Thank you. In the interest of equality, so that the rest that you can exercise one of your arms, if you are a regular, if you ten programs all the time, if youre one of ourr members please raie your hand. Thank you so much. Thank you. The folks who raised your hand the first time around please dont take my word for it alone. Ask anyone else around you who sent with the second time why to support this institution, why they come on a regular basis, what i know many of them by the first thing. Those whose first name i have learned i will do my best to learn them. Also im going to suggest for those who of you are not as a note to pick up one of our quarterly calendar brochures. This will let you know about all of our upcoming programs. I wont steal more of the time this afternoon to list them all but i will tell you that we have a program this coming thursday evening. Its going to be an exhibition opening for a brandnew exhibition we just mounted, and that on this thursday the 21st 21st. Next sunday with another program. We. We have a film and discussion in ways tangentially related to the subject matter today. Were going to be showing the film memories of the iceland trial which was an israeli made documentary that interviewed survivors and others who were witnesses or who attended the trial. One of those witnesses was henrik ross whose photographs are featured in a special exhibition right now, memories and earth. Those are just a few of the reason for you to return and i hope that you will. At the conclusion of todays program our presenter will be available to sign copies of her new book, citizen 865 the hunt for hitlers hidden soldiers in america. So as a courtesy to ask you to please allow her to exit the stage and the auditorium, and continue your conversation with her over in c the vicinity of or legacy shop. Some of you may notice that we have some additional apparatus i in the room today. We are very excited that this afternoons program is being preserveds and take her future broadcaststs by cspan, cspan booktv. We are excited to have an author whose work commands such important attention as it should because the subject matter will never go out of style. You a little bit about our presenter. Debbie cenziper is associate professor and director of investigative reporting at Medill School ofou journalism northwestern university. She oversees the material Investigative Lab or investigative, ill have to learn where you put the syllable emphasis. She is a Pulitzer Prizewinning Investigative Reporter and Nonfiction Author who writes for the washingtongt post. She has spent three years at George Washington university before joining the faculty at mcgill. Over the years her investigative stories have expose wrongdoing, prompted congressional hearings and led to changes in federal and local laws. In her class at mcgill, she at her studentsil focus on investigative reporting. She has won dozens of awards in american print journalism including the robert f. Kennedy award for reporting about human rights and the goldsmith prize for investigative reporting from harvard university. She received the pulitzer in 2007 at the miami herald for a series of stories about corrupt Affordable Housing developers who were stealing from before. A year before that she was the Pulitzer Prize finalist for stories about dangerous breakdowns in the nations hurricane tracking system. Debbie is a frequent speaker at universities, writing conferences and book events. Our first book, love wins, the lovers and lawyers who fought the landmark case for Marriage Equality published in 2016 was named one of the most notable books of the year by the washington post. Her second book, the recently released hot offw the presses citizen 865 the hunt forid hitlers hidden soldiers in america is her topic of conversation with us today. She is based on the washington d. C. In campus working with undergraduate and graduate students on investigative stories, and were delighted to present to you this afternoon Debbie Cenziper. R. [applause] thank you for that lovely introduction, lillian. I very much appreciate it. Im so happy to be with you here today, though i am based in washington, d. C. For this First Quarter at northwestern, i have been here at evanston learning all about evanston and northwestern and chicago, and its been a lot of fun and am so happy to be here to be talked about this book project. Let me tell you why this book that started. Very loud disco music playing in the background and he had had enough but i ended up having a conversation with a woman we were dealing with we never met before. She was a lawyer from the Us Department of justice and over this long, unexpected conversation, robin gold start telling me about this littleknown unit deep inside the Us Justice Department that had spent three decades hunting nazi war criminals on us soil and no way spent a decade on staff at the washington post. I knew little about this unit and i remember thinking two things. Asking myself two questions after this two our conversation. Number one, how is it possible that so many years after the war, 70 some years after the holocaust there were still nazi perpetrators and war criminals living here on us soil. I could not understand that and was fascinated by the idea that that was even happening here and more than that, who were the women at the Justice Department who spent the bulk of their careers hunting for these perpetrators and how were they able to spend day after day, year after year inside some of the darkest moments in recent history. How were they able to do that and go home at night to their wives and husbands, how do they go home to their children, take vacations and live normal lives when during the day they were hearing about and reliving some of the most horrible horrific moments in holocaust history. In the department of justice. After i rounded up my husband from a Cocktail Party he was sitting outside hunched over reading the National Post waiting for me for quite a long time. A week later i called up the historian to work in the nazi hunting unit. I asked barry to talk to me about what she was doing here and recounted a story that prompted me to write this book. Soon after the collapse of communism, barry white and peter black, you already got my joke and i havent told you my joke yet. Already got to the punch line. They went communism had collapsed and they knew that the nazis had stashed a lot of records in progress, war documents and they could never get to them because the communist government wouldnt allow them inside the archives but after the collapse of communism they could get in and this is a treasure trove of information for these historians. Imagine what we might find. It would shoved across germany, in the middle of the night. The russian caretaker was very upset barry white was not there with her husband. She was pregnant at the time addressing caretaker very much wanted to be there for breakfast. That was not a good thing for barry who was very early on in her pregnancy but ended up inside this massive archive. And very black said im doctor black and this is doctor white. We are before the department of justice. All the agents started to smirk and thinking the cia has no imagination. These must be government spies. Off they go into the dusty archives in this Office Building in prague and soon enough barry white pushes back, looking at this piece of paper, runs over to peter black, said i found something, the nazi rafter from 1945 that lifted the name of 700 men who participated in one of the most lethal occupations in poland and some of those men they knew were here in the United States living on us soil. They recognized some of the names. Was a turning point in an investigation that spanned 15 years and is at the heart of the book citizen 865 the hunt for hitlers hidden soldiers in america. As soon as i talked to barry white i knew this was my next book, this was a story i wanted to tell. Let me give you a little bit of background. I focused heavily on historian so prosecutors are the heroes of this book as well. I focused heavily on historians, i spend 25 years of my life as an Investigative Reporter. Documents intrigued me. I love documents, historians were able to find documents from all over eastern europe, inside communist party. They went to kiev, fraud, poland, and all this about men in the United States. I found that absolutely intriguing as an Investigative Reporter that there were men and women who spend their careers in this obscure outpost in the us apartment of justice with sustained carpeting in the window that faced mcdonalds. Here they were hunting nazi war criminals in us soil and were absolutely determined to bring them to justice no matter how much time passed. I found it really inspiring as a journalist, as a mother, a wife, a human being. These are the people who in part drive this story. A little bit of background. As you all know poland had more jews before the war than any other country in the world probably accept the United States. It was a thriving hub for jewish life and it was also considered a strategic stronghold for the right because there was less farmland, they wanted to turn over to german settlers. Poland was a strategic location of a strategic area for the right and what do you do with the jews . She experimented with gasing in germany. That idea of efficient mass murder was very interesting and intriguing to the Police Leader of the district. A man known i will botch his last name. He was tasked with deciding what to do with the jews of occupied poland. They were fighting on the soviet front, needed help to annihilate the jews of poland and so he ended up recruiting from soviet pow tents who captured soviet soldiers, they were put in camps where they likely faced death. She recruited them and essentially taught them to fight for the enemy and recruited lithuanian, latvians, polls and other recruits and brought them to a farming village south of warsaw. He was an incredible location, rail lines that connected village to other key points in occupied poland. He recruited 5000 men to this camp. It became a fool for mass murder. These men were trained in nazi ideology, they were armed, they were empowered, they were taught military drills, german marching commands, they were dispatched for mass murder. And to the jewish ghettos of occupied poland where they liquidated together. They were brought, they participated in shooting operations through occupied poland and they forced jews to the gas chambers in occupied poland. The men essentially became the manpower, they were the men who did the bloodiest jobs in occupied poland and the jews who survived describe the men as more brutal and more vicious and more bloodthirsty than even members of the ss. The footsoldier of the third reich, and he became their base. This is where they were trained and issued deployment orders to go across occupied poland and help the ss annihilate the jews. These are the men who did the bloodiest jobs in occupied poland. One of the historians said they were the foot soldiers of the third reich. They were often known by the jews as the men wearing black coats and black hats. Some of the men were from ukraine or that region but there were others, many others, lithuania and latvia. The s s came up an incredible system because these men were given wages. They were given housing, given food, given service metals, they were given vacations, they were given all kinds of honors, they received proper burials. In soviet pow camp serving the enemy, seems like a decent option, likely starvation or death or some kind of horrible death. The first deployment was to the city that you can see on the map, lube and with the historical, cultural and Religious Center where thousands of polands 40,000 jews lived in poland in 1939, held leadership positions on the town council, leading members of the business community. Just a thriving jewish cultural hub since 1935 and it was here that two of the main characters in my book met and they were just children in every way at the time. Friends and families were friends. Lucindas father was a Court Interpreter before the war, her mother was a dentist. And his father was an architect before the war and these two teenagers were pushed into the lubeland get a by the nazis along with friends and neighbors in every major member of their extended family. 40,000 jews were put into this ghetto. Everything, water shortages. For all kinds of reasons, Lucinda Felix was able to survive mass deportations in this ghetto. The survival stories like all the survival stories i heard, it took my breath away as a writer but they were in this ghetto in lubeland, one day men in black coats and black caps around the perimeters of the ghetto put on floodlights and demand every family come outside and in this ghetto, 1500 jews a day are supported east. Lucinda and felix felix was about 19 or so. Friends and neighbors and extended family, they didnt know where they had gone. They were men in black coats and black caps and they were described as more vicious, more violent than the dreaded ss. They went to a Jewish Hospital and murder the patients and doctors and nurses, they went to a jewish orphanage and murdered the children along with Staff Members who refused to leave the children behind, they went into the woods and shot jews at the edge of a redeem ravine and these men, they were trained at the school for mass murder. This school was so important to the ss the top leadership came to visit including himmler. Felix and lucy escaped, they escape the lubeland ghetto and at the cover of night took a train to warsaw because they didnt have any place to go, inside the jewish ghetto of warsaw because she had an uncle there and decided at the last minute they needed to get out of the ghetto. In the weeks before the uprising with the help of the polish underground, they escaped the warsaw ghetto, probably saved their lives because they escaped just before the uprising. What they didnt know was the men followed, worked sidebyside with the germans to suppress the jewish uprising, they survived warsaw, out ran the men and lucy and felix at the end of the war in a small village near krakow. They were hiding in plain sight and felix became a teacher for the local children in the village, never told anyone, obviously he was a jew. It the end of the war, soviet tanks rumbling toward the farm village. He crawled into the woods on hands and knees. Liberation, liberation, a russian commander walked into the building approached phoenix and felix that i am a teacher here. For the first time in many months, the commander said to him, all the jews are dead, must be a spy. The commander crawled over a jewish soviet soldier and said you are a jew, he is a jew, speak hebrew to each other and felix came from a very assimilated family in lubeland, did not speak much yiddish and brought in a rabbi to the house to teach him a little bit of his history and felix would wait until rabbi does off, skip to the last page and when the rabbi woke up, i finished my study. Now he is faced with proving he is a jew in what could have been a life or death moment, somewhere in the back of his memory, the back of his mind he remembered the holiest prayer, the soviet soldier said lets really are jim and hugged felix and that is how felix and lucinda to assess how they assessed how they survived the war, they went to lubeland to see if anyone was left before the war, there were 40,000 jews living in lubeland, only 200 survived including felix and lucinda. They needed to get out of lubeland because every rock had blood on it. Every neighbor was a stranger by then and felix finished his medical degree, became a doctor. In 1951 they came to the United States. What they didnt know until years later and what many and most jewish survivors did not know until years later is the men followed, they slipped into the United States by lying about their whereabouts during the war, came in large part due to the displaced persons act, bringing in war refugees escaping from communism and jewish survivors. Hiding in plain sight in cities and suburbs across the country. They were living in new york, florida, ohio and in the chicago region. What investigators found that the department of justice is there were more than a dozen living in the United States. Imagine knowing the very same men who persecuted and had a hand in killing everyone you ever knew were living in the United States sidebyside, with holocaust victims, their descendents in war veterans who crossed an ocean to free them. Imagine how that felt knowing that that was the case. When they came here many of them became naturalized citizens, pledged to defend the constitution and living here with Social Security benefits, they married, had children, they were naturalized, that they had a hand in killing. People at the department of justice didnt really know much about travely. It was known to the east but not western investigators, they did not have access to the archives. Some men were known. Does everyone know john that is where he was trained, that was his base camp. American investigators knew but didnt under