Hermann Goering, Joachim Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess were three of 24 Nazi leaders tried for World War II war crimes in tribunals held in Nuremberg, Germany from October 18, 1945 to October 1, 1946.
Bettmann Archive
What is it about Nazi-hunting that captivates the imagination? Why does it feel so satisfying to see a goose-stepping fanatic of the Third Reich brought to justice?
Simple: there is no moral ambiguity regarding their crimes. The Holocaust was so unspeakably abominable that a new word had to be invented just to properly describe the profound evil and devastation unleashed upon humanity by Nazism.
“What they did with Hitler at the top of this scheme—to take over Europe and rule the world through aggressive war, criminality, and genocide—was something that had never been done before in history,” author and longtime Inside Edition executive producer Charles Lachman recently told me over Zoom. “There was no more monstrous regime in my opinion than Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. They were monsters, and they triggered the worst event in human history.”
In writing his 2024 book Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine, Lachman became fascinated with the immediate aftermath of World War II, particularly how the last vestiges of the heinous Nazi apparatus were put on trial at Nuremberg. The unprecedented legal proceedings are well-known, of course, but the road to finding the defendants and exposing their misdeeds to the world is a little more obscure.
“Many people believe they surrendered. Most people don’t even think about it,” Lachman said. “So that’s what got me going on the research. What followed was a very fascinating research journey into the chaos of a post-war Germany.”
That research ultimately became his latest work of non-fiction, They Shall Not See The Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich’s Most Wanted, which provides an enthralling, addictively page-turning chronicle of how the most notorious Nazi fugitives were tracked down by Allied forces in the days, weeks, and months following Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, the men responsible for igniting the deadliest conflict of all time scrambled to hide, to run, to avoid culpability and the hangman’s noose.
“It became a chase book, almost like a nonfiction Day of the Jackal,” Lachman said. “They were living under phony names and identity papers, and the story of how they were captured and by whom became the focus of my book.”
‘They Shall Not See the Dawn’ cover
Courtesy of Diversion Books
Not wanting it to read like far-flung history, Lachman opted to tell the story in first person, adding a sense of immediacy to the 81-year-old events.
“I wanted to create a unique narrative flow,” explained the author. “I think the present tense technique is a mechanism designed to suck the reader into the storyline; to make the reader part of the drama of what these great American heroes were experiencing at the time.”
Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, Robert Ley, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel and the rest of the “celebrity” Nazi offenders tried and sentenced at Nuremberg may be familiar to the average citizen, but the individuals who rooted them out deserve just as much, if not more, awareness in the public consciousness.
“My book focuses on a forgotten story of the manhunt across Germany,” noted Lachman. “It was conducted mainly by an elite force of American agents who were assigned to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, and some of these agents, Henry Kissinger and J. D. Salinger, became famous many years later.”
“It’s fun chasing Nazis,” he added, “especially when they’re being chased by good guys who win in the end. Nothing beats that in terms of a narrative storyline.”
Offering a greater sense of catharsis is the fact that a many of those good guys were Jews—both assimilated Americans and native Germans who saw the writing on the wall as the antisemitic policies enacted under National Socialism grew increasingly pernicious. The latter group proved themselves especially valuable as interpreters of German language and culture.
“The best of them were kicked out of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, came to America as penniless refugees, learned English, were given a fast track to U.S. citizenship, joined the Army, and returned to Germany as members of the conquering U.S. Army,” said Lachman. “Imagine the sense of retribution, the Jewish justice if you will, that they must have felt coming back to Germany to contribute significantly to tracking down these Nazis.”
While numerous high-profile fugitives were located via traditional detective work on the part of the Counter Intelligence Corps, others were captured through mere happenstance or a soldier’s gut instinct amidst the post-war confusion that allowed many (like Eichmann, Mengele, and Barbie) to slip through the cracks.
“It’s a challenging, proverbial needle in a haystack,” stressed Lachman. “It’s not like today where you have social and mass media, and wanted individuals are caught in a matter of hours.”
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 29: (L-R) Producer Charles Lachman at Park Central New York on October 29, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Inside Edition)
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At the same time high-ranking Nazis were being found, arrested, and imprisoned, the Allies were also making a concerted effort to “snuff out Hitlerism before the Third Reich could be carried on to the next phase of of German history,” Lachman said.
That meant dismantling the Werewolves, a clandestine guerrilla force set up by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to fight the invading forces with the same partisan ferocity that had so infuriated the Nazis in the countries they occupied throughout the war. “They planned, in their words, to ‘devour the enemy,’” Lachman continued, “and hit the occupying forces of the U.S. Army, Britain, and Soviets by surprise. Eisenhower and other top U.S. military [knew] they had to be stomped out before they could organize into this effective guerrilla army.”
Similarly, the Allies needed hard proof of Hitler’s suicide: his last will and testament. The dictator dictated the document in the Führerbunker and had three copies given to a trio of couriers: Hitler’s deputy press secretary Heinz Lorenz, SS major and Hitler adjutant Willi Johannmeier, and Martin Bormann’s adjutant Wilhelm Zander. Their job was to somehow evade the Red Army closing in on Berlin and deliver the Führer’s final instructions, which included the names of his successors and one last invective aimed at the Jews.
It’s quite a bizarre and seemingly oft-overlooked chapter of WWII’s conclusion that held profound implications for the Allies’ plan to exorcise Hitler, as Frederick Taylor put it, from all aspects of German society.
“Tracking down those three couriers became an important part of British and U.S. intelligence because because it established the circumstances of his death,” Lachman said. “It was a real mystery and concern all over the world, mainly triggered by Joseph Stalin, [who claimed] Hitler was actually alive and living under the protection of the British government.”
Aside from two suicides, all of the war criminals sentenced to death at Nuremberg faced the gallows. Lachman’s book draws its title from the longstanding tradition of staging executions after midnight, but before dawn.
As the author put it, General Eisenhower, “didn’t want the Nazis [convicted at Nuremberg] to live to see another sunrise.”
They Shall Not See the Dawn is on sale from Diversion books Sep. 1.
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