"The life and mysterious death of Otto Wachter, former Governor of Nazi-occupied Poland, who died in the Vatican after World War II"--

A first-person account by the Israeli agent who captured Hitler's chief executioner.

Relates the life story of Josef Mengele and quotes from the testimonies of twin children who were the victims of his sadistic pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz. They speak about the complicated psychological problems which they confronted after the war, and which caused their silence in the 1950s-70s. In 1984 the organization of surviving twins, CANDLES, was established, which organized a trip to Auschwitz in 1985 and publicized their reminiscences.

An autobiography by Zuroff (born in 1948 in New York), focusing on his relentless search for Holocaust perpetrators, both Nazis and their local collaborators, mainly in Eastern Europe, who after World War II found refuge in the USA and other Western countries. In 1978 Zuroff began to work at the newly established Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and from 1979 he worked with the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, created to take legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators living in the USA. In the late 1980s he launched a campaign on behalf of the Wiesenthal Center to prosecute Nazi criminals and collaborators who had entered Australia, Canada, Britain, and other Western countries posing as refugees. In the course of his activities, Zuroff was confronted with the reluctance of authorities in Western countries to punish citizens who had been Holocaust perpetrators; many of those who Zuroff was able to trace died unpunished. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he launched a similar campaign in formerly communist countries; his attempts to convince Latvian and Estonian governments to de-heroize mass murderers such as Herberts Cukurs and Evald Mikson, and to bring to trial numerous others, were in vain. In 1998-99, however, he was successful in achieving the extradition to Croatia from Argentina and then the trial and punishment of Dinko Šakić. Buoyed by the success, Zuroff began Operation Last Chance, aiming to trace and bring to trial former mass murderers from the Baltics, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, Romania, etc. Relates some achievements of this operation. Zuroff's activities have occasionally evoked antisemitic and neo-Nazi backlash in the Baltics, Croatia, and elsewhere.