Bill O’Reilly chases Nazi hunters in ‘Killing’

Bill O’Reilly is “Killing” again – back with the eighth installment of his hugely successful history series – this time telling the story of the global postwar hunt for Nazi war criminals and how they were finally brought to justice or escaped altogether. For the O’Reilly faithful, “Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History” (Henry Holt & Co., 304 pp., will, no doubt, be a welcome addition to the best-selling series (“Killing Kennedy,” “Killing Lincoln,” et al). For others, there’s a decidedly cutand-paste quality to this non-fiction thriller, co-written by the former Fox News anchor with Martin Dugard. There’s nothing particularly new here about the search for Adolf Hitler’s most notorious henchmen and women – among them Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who insisted “I never killed a Jew” and was unrepentant to the end. It was Eichmann who was particularly responsible for the cold-blooded efficiency of the Final Solution, characterized by mass deportation and extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish men, women and children. Eichmann eventually was captured in Argentina and smuggled to Israel in 1960. He was convicted and hanged for his crimes in 1962. Nor is new ground broken on the escape or capture of Josef Mengele, Martin Bormann, Klaus Barbie and Elfriede Huth or the Nazi hunters who pursued them – from the best known such as Simon Wiesenthal to the less often celebrated Isser Harel (director of the Mossad) and war crimes investigator and prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz. This is a book made for TV minds. That’s not to say that given the high profile of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in this country and around the world and the ascendance of “alternative facts,” there aren’t some important reminders. Because conspiracy theories still abound about many of the people, players and events covered in O’Reilly’s book, the authors take a “We report. You decide” stance on “speculative issues.” But for those who inexplicably still have any doubt about Hitler’s Final Solution, they thankfully do add: “What is known for certain is that millions were murdered in the Holocaust.”