Such teams might be government funded, run through refugee documentation centers like those begun by Tuviah Friedman in Vienna and Simon Wiesenthal in Linz, or conducted privately. There was no common strategy or agreement on tactics, and such groups often disagreed (or even feuded!) Perpetually underfunded and overextended, they tracked war criminals through the tedious cross-checking of records, wary interviews with a suspect’s neighbors or family who had no legal obligation to cooperate, and long hours following a suspect’s friends and acquaintances, often attempting to make positive identifications with nothing more than old photographs and outdated witness testimony. Much depended on bribery, charm, guile—and patience, because most hunts took months or years.
Catching a war criminal was only the beginning. There was no guarantee an arrest would lead to a trial: in Europe, many former Nazis still held positions of power, and war crimes trials were stymied by everything from passive resistance to outright death threats. Pursuing criminals overseas was even more of a nightmare, and some teams resorted to illegal means in such cases: either a kidnapping job to circumvent extradition (Mossad’s black-bag snatch of Adolf Eichmann, bringing him from Argentina to Israel where he was tried and executed), or outright assassination (the killing of Herberts Cukurs, called “the Eichmann of Latvia,” in Brazil).
Ian and Nina Graham are fictional Nazi hunters, though they were inspired in part by the famous husband and wife team Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, whose partnership is both a moving postwar romance and an inspiring dedication to human justice—their most famous catch was Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” and they’re still tirelessly dedicated to the fight against fascism although now in their eighties. Tony Rodomovsky is also fictional, as is his Boston center and Ian’s Vienna-based one, though such centers were invaluable not just in hunting war criminals, but in documenting the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Without their work preserving witness statements and camp evidence, much information about Nazi atrocities would have been lost. Fritz Bauer, on the other hand, was a very real man: a Jewish refugee who returned to his homeland postwar and tirelessly prosecuted war criminals despite hostility from a West German government that wanted to forget its past crimes. Times have changed since those days, and in a modern Germany that has taken responsibility for its horrendous history, Fritz Bauer is now honored as one of the first Nazi hunters.
In writing The Huntress, I realized I needed a link between my team of Nazi hunters and their elusive quarry—and as soon as I read about the Night Witches, I knew I had found my link. The Soviet Union was the only nation involved in the Second World War to put women in the sky as fighter and bomber pilots, and what women they were! Products of the Soviet aviation drive of the 1930s, these young fliers were championed by Marina Raskova, the Amelia Earhart of the USSR. The day bombers and the fighter pilots (among the latter, Lilia Litviak, seen in cameo at the Engels training camp, was killed in an aerial dogfight during the war, but became history’s first female ace) eventually integrated with male personnel . . . but the night bombers remained all-female throughout their term of service and were fiercely proud of this fact.
The ladies of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment went to war in the outdated Polikarpov U-2, an open-cockpit cloth-and-plywood biplane, achingly slow and highly flammable, built without radio, parachute, or brakes. (It was redesignated the Po-2 after 1943; I was unable to pinpoint an exact date for the change, and continued to use the term U-2 for clarity.) The women flew winter and summer, anywhere from five to eighteen runs per night, relying on stimulants that destroyed their ability to rest once off-duty. They flew continuously under these conditions for three years, surviving on catnaps and camaraderie, developing the conveyor belt land-and-refuel routine that gave them a far more efficient record than comparable night bomber regiments. The women’s relentless efficiency waged ruthless psychological warfare on the Germans below, who thought their silent glide-down sounded like witches on broomsticks, and awarded them the nickname “die Nachthexen.” Such dedication took a toll: the regiment lost approximately 27 percent of its flying personnel to crashes and enemy fire. The Night Witches were also awarded a disproportionately higher percentage of Hero of the Soviet Union medals—the USSR’s highest decoration.
Nina Markova is fictional, but not her exploits. Lieutenant Serafima Amosova-Taranenko was born in remote Siberia, saw a Pe-5 perform a forced landing, and swore to become a pilot. Senior Lieutenant Yevgeniya Zhigulenko finagled her way into the training group by pestering a random colonel in the aviation department until he gave her an appointment, then refusing to leave until he referred her to Raskova. Navigator Irina Kashirina successfully made a one-armed landing, taking the stick with one hand while holding her wounded pilot off the front-cockpit controls with the other. Captain Larisa Litvinova-Rozanova described the way pilot and navigator would trade naps to and from the target, as well as the horror of watching three planes before her and one plane behind her shot down by a night fighter (the regiment’s worst night of losses). Major Mariya Smirnova was pushed out over the Sea of Azov by low cloud cover, and nearly drowned. Several Night Witches described such experiences as climbing out on a wing to knock off a bomb stuck on the rack, being chased down by pursuing German planes, singing and dancing and embroidering during airfield waits, hazing from the male pilots, and—worst of all!—the indignity of wearing mass-issued men’s underwear.
Yelena is also a fictional character; it isn’t known if there were any romantic relationships between women of the Forty-Sixth. In the oppressive atmosphere of the Soviet Union, no one would have spoken a word of any such liaison had it existed. Pilot memoirs and interviews are similarly close-lipped about criticism of the ruling regime—even after the fall of the Soviet Union, only one Night Witch openly admitted hating Stalin and his rule. Undoubtedly there were others who were less than ardent Communists even as they fought to defend their homeland, but like Nina, they would have remembered the listening ears of the secret police and kept quiet. There is no record that any woman of the Forty-Sixth defected on a bombing run, but the Red Air Force was evidently afraid such things could happen, since they made a point of refusing posthumous honors to any deceased pilot whose body was not recovered. Soviet superiors were clearly aware of the danger that some resourceful pilot might take his or her plane in the opposite direction to find a new life in the West.
Poland, where Nina crashes in August 1944, would have been a hellish place to survive. The doomed Warsaw rebellion was in full roar, the Soviet army pushing from the east as Nazis began to flee west. Poznań, renamed Posen by the Germans, was a place steeped in tragedy: many Polish citizens were displaced, arrested, and executed as German settlers moved in to make a new Aryan province. Lake Rusalka was created using Polish slave labor, and though there was no Huntress living in an ocher-walled mansion on its shores, the lake was the site of several massacres. Memorials to the dead stand today in silent witness among the trees around an otherwise beautiful nature spot. Poznań was also the site of a prisoner of war camp, Stalag XXI-D, home to many Allied prisoners sitting out the war in idle frustration. Many had been captured during the retreat to Dunkirk, including members of the Sixth Battalion Royal West Kents in whose ranks I placed the fictional Sebastian Graham. Escape attempts from behind stalag walls were common; most escapees were recaptured or killed, but at least one man—Allan Wolfe, referenced by Sebastian—walked to Czechoslovakia and managed to survive living rough in the countryside until the war’s end, so survival in the wild was possible, if difficult.
The pretty spa town of Altaussee was a bolt-hole for any number of high-ranking Nazi officials in the war’s immediate aftermath, including Adolf Eichmann. His wife continued to live at 8 Fischerndorf with their sons—in 1952, a few years after her fictional interview with Ian and his team in this book, the real Vera Eichmann quietly packed up her children and joined her husband in exile. Had anyone been keeping watch on her, Eichmann would likely have been caught years before his eventual capture in 1960.