Historical studies of Nazi perpetrators generally fall into two categories. There are those that focus on the persons who conceived, initiated, and participated in the Nazi Final Solution of the Jewish Question during World War II. And there are those that examine how these figures were brought to justice in war-crimes trials decades later. Gerald Steinacher's new book, Nazis on the Run, joins the growing list of studies that focus on the period in between, the time in which countless perpetrators tried—often with great success—to elude the not-so-long arm of the law.

Steinacher's book appears at a time of growing attention to the history of Germany in the chaotic period immediately before and after the end of World War II. In addition to recently published surveys of Germany at the moment of the so-called Stunde Null, such as Giles MacDonogh's After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Richard Bessel's Germany 1945: From War to Peace, Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944–45, and Frederick Taylor's Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany, there have been more specialized studies of how Nazi perpetrators coped with the Third Reich's collapse, such as Perry Biddiscome's The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944-1947, Uki Goñi's The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, and Heinz Schneppen's Odessa und das Vierte Reich. Mythen der Zeitgeschichte. Unlike these latter books, which chronicle the failed efforts of various Nazi organizations to return to power, Steinacher's well-researched volume explains how individual Nazi perpetrators registered lesser, but still significant, triumphs by eluding justice.

The list of perpetrators discussed by Steinacher includes both well-known and comparatively obscure figures. Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Franz Stangl, Klaus Barbie, Walter Rauff, Erich Priebke, and Josef Schwammberger head up the list of the prominent Nazis who escaped Europe for destinations in Latin America or the Middle East, while lesser-known party members and pro-Nazi collaborators from other countries, such as Hungary and Croatia, are also discussed at length.

In explaining how Nazi perpetrators escaped Europe for destinations abroad, Steinacher begins by citing the sheer chaos that dominated the continent at the end of the war and the immediate postwar period. With 6.5 million displaced persons in Germany in 1945, it was next to impossible for the authorities to distinguish between refugees and war criminals. Countless people lacked legitimate forms of identification and those who wanted to disappear into the mass of displaced humanity had little difficulty blending in. For Nazi criminals seeking to avoid capture and prosecution, the best plan was to join the throngs of refugees on the move and leave Germany for other destinations. Steinacher shows how the preferred route extended from southern Germany, through Austria, and over the Brenner Pass into northern Italy. South Tirol, especially cities such as Bozen and Meran, became an important way station where Nazis, often with the aid of smugglers (who were often former party members themselves), would hide out in safe houses before making their way to the port of Genoa and then to ships that took them to their final destinations abroad.

These Nazi escapees could not have been so successful, however, without the assistance of a variety of ostensibly apolitical institutions and organizations. Steinacher devotes the core of his book to showing, in three highly detailed chapters, how the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Vatican, and the United States's intelligence services all contributed to the escape of major Nazi war criminals.

The ICRC was important for its role in issuing identification and travel papers to stateless refugees who lacked valid identification. Countless Nazis took advantage of the organization's policy of neutral humanitarianism, not to mention its lax oversight and quality control of applicants' identity claims. Eventually, certain American officials recognized the abuses and, after voicing complaints, the ICRC stopped issuing documents in 1950. By then, of course, many war criminals had already escaped. Steinacher illustrates this process with numerous detailed case studies of individual Nazis, some better known than others. And he effectively makes his case that the ICRC ultimately “bears the burden of responsibility . . . for assisting the escape of Nazis, despite its valuable service to many legitimate refugees” (p. 100).

The Vatican also assisted the flight of Nazis through its Vatican Relief Commission (PCA), which was established to aid Catholic refugees and also combat the postwar threat of Soviet Communism. Headed by the anticommunist Cardinal Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI), the PCA found support among many conservative priests, some of whom, such as Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal and Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganovic, actively worked to assist ex-Nazis escape Europe for safety abroad, finding them temporary shelter in monasteries and providing them with new identification. Hudal and Draganovic, according to Steinacher, were motivated by their ideological sympathy for Nazism and their fierce opposition to communism. Other priests, by contrast, were focused more on religious concerns, as was shown by their eagerness to baptize (and often rebaptize, in contravention to canon law) Nazi perpetrators as the price for assisting their escape.

Steinacher concludes his book by examining why the U.S. intelligence services helped Nazi perpetrators escape and why the escapees' preferred destination was Argentina. The answer to both questions is that the U.S. and Argentina both wanted to recruit Nazi experts from the fields of science, industry, and espionage for postwar employment in various enterprises. The U.S. hoped to use German intelligence figures, such as Reinhard Gehlen and Otto von Bolschwing, to develop an anticommunist spy ring. Juan Peron hoped to use Nazi technicians and engineers to help to modernize Argentina's fledgling defense industry and scientific establishment. Both countries thus facilitated the escape of Nazi perpetrators by getting them out of Europe and into sanctuaries in the western hemisphere.

Steinacher ultimately concludes quite reasonably that the reason that Hitler's henchmen succeeded in fleeing justice was that the imperatives of the Cold War made it practically inevitable. The western Allies' swift conversion to anticommunism after 1945 meant that old Nazis from a defunct regime were not perceived as a pressing threat and were essentially ignored; the fact that many of these Nazis maintained connections with one another and established networks to facilitate their escape—which was aided and abetted by various organizations—further helped their chances in the early postwar years; finally, the fact that too many Nazis had too much expertise that could be exploited by third parties explained why they were given refuge in Latin America and the Middle East. Most of these events transpired under the radar screen of most observers, of course, who were preoccupied with the Soviet threat. This further explains why it was only after the Cold War's end that the stories chronicled by Steinacher attracted the attention of scholars and journalists.

Hitler's Henchmen does an admirably thorough job of surveying the larger factors involved in the escape of Nazi perpetrators. Some nonspecialists may find that the book at times leans too heavily on description at the expense of analysis, and its numerous case studies do end up becoming somewhat repetitive in discussing the escape of individual Nazis. On balance, however, the book is a model of careful archival research and raises important questions not only of immediate postwar history but postwar memory as well. Although Steinacher does not devote any attention to the subject, it is interesting to speculate whether certain Nazis' evasion of justice, while deplorable from a moral standpoint, might have had a silver lining. Is it possible that the flight of so many Nazi perpetrators and collaborators from Europe helped to prevent a Nazi revival—the dreaded Fourth Reich of the literary imagination—after 1945? Did Latin America not in some way function as a safety valve—like the frontier in nineteenth-century America or the colony of Australia for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England—that, by welcoming political extremists from Europe, helped to prevent them from undermining the postwar democratic order? Moreover, to draw on Hermann Lübbe's famous thesis, is it possible that the postwar world's initial disinterest in bringing Nazi perpetrators to justice—its disinterest in historical memory—was also a necessary price for a postwar democratic order? Steinacher does not tackle these questions explicitly, but in concluding his book by pointing to the renewed interest among scholars and the general public in the subject of how justice was betrayed, he increases the possibility that such questions may be answered in the future.