If you’re a history buff, you can’t go wrong with my buddy Dean Reuter’s The Hidden Nazi: The Untold Story of America’s Deal with the Devil, which is being published in paperback this week after its initial success in 2019.
Many of us in NR-world know Dean as the senior VP and general counsel of the Federalist Society, and as the editor of a couple of excellent volumes on law and national security (including one on counterterrorism edited with our friend John Yoo, to which I contributed a few years back). But Dean is also a fabulous writer in his own right, and a meticulous researcher.
In The Hidden Nazi, he joined forces with two other tireless researchers — Colm Lowery and Keith Chester — to unearth the shocking story of Nazi general Hans Kammler, top-tier member of Hitler’s Wehrmacht who was singularly responsible for some of the worst monstrousness of the concentration-camp system.
Kammler’s position in the inner sanctum also made him responsible for the regime’s programs on rockets and secret weapons, which were among the most advanced of the era and thus a coveted prize of Russian and Western intelligence agencies. Kammler became the Nazi that time forgot because of his “suicide” at the war’s end. But there was no suicide — certainly not as related. As the authors compellingly show, Kammler was in American custody postwar, well after he’d supposedly taken his own life.
With the pace and suspense of great historical fiction — except here, it is all too real — Reuter & Co. piece together the story of what happened to Kammler and why. Like most stories the government laboriously conceals beneath mountains of paper and trails of misdirection, it is a story that is vital to tell — pregnant with lessons of lost history and warnings about official mischief that are, to say the least, highly relevant today.
Congratulations to Dean and his co-authors on the release of the paperback. Do yourself a favor and pick it up!