MELROSE PARK, Pa.—Gratz College will host Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of a new book about Nazi hunters working inside the U.S. Department of Justice, for its Dec. 12 Shusterman Distinguished Scholar Lecture. The series is endowed at Gratz College through the generosity of Judith and Murray Shusterman.

David Weinstein, an attorney and member of Gratz’s Board of Governors, will interview Cenziper during this event. Weinstein served as co-lead counsel for a class of Jewish survivors and the estates and heirs of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

A contributing investigative reporter at The Washington Post, Cenziper in late 2016 learned of a team of prosecutors and historians at the Department of Justice who were racing against time to expose members of one of the most lethal killing operations of WWII. Some of these soldiers, recruited to help annihilate the Jewish population of Poland, had disappeared into American communities after the war. Seventy years later, DOJ officials were still tracking them down.
 
“I was fascinated when I heard there were Nazi collaborators living on U.S. land so many decades after the war,” Cenziper said. “Then I learned there was still an active hunt for them. I had no idea that so many people were able to slip into the U.S., or that they were still hiding in plain sight. That was such an incredible affront.”
 
Cenziper’s book, Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers, follows two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran their would-be killers and found safe haven in the United States—only to learn that some of their Nazi oppressors had followed them to the U.S. The story spans seven decades and includes accounts and research from insiders in four countries.
 
A Philadelphia native, Cenziper said one of the heroes of her book also called Philadelphia home. Ned Stutman, a senior trial attorney at the DOJ who successfully prosecuted a series of Nazi war criminals living in the U.S., grew up in Philadelphia and attended law school at Temple University.
 
In 2001, Stutman stood in front of a packed federal courtroom in Cleveland, where he presented opening arguments against Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk. Stutman spent hours in court that day, Cenziper said, never letting on that just hours before he stepped into the courtroom he had received news that he had an incurable form of cancer.
 
“He died rather young,” Cenziper said of Stutman. “But he left behind a lasting legacy.”
 
Cenziper’s book sheds light on an important chapter in WWII history—a chapter that has yet to close, said Gratz President Dr. Paul Finkelman. While much of the Holocaust narrative focuses on 1940s Eastern Europe, Dr. Finkelman noted that this book serves as a reminder that “thousands of war criminals have been hiding in the United States for decades, often lying about their past.”
 
“Nazis who killed civilians with guns or herded them into cattle cars and then gas chambers, abandoned their uniforms, constructed a false narrative of merely being soldiers or office workers, and slipped unnoticed into the U.S.,” Dr. Finkelman said. “This book tells the redemptive stories of prosecutors tracking these killers down, stripping them of their U.S. citizenship and deporting them. It’s history worth knowing.”
 
Copies of Citizen 865 will be available for purchase and signing during the Dec. 12 lecture. Although her lecture focuses on the crimes of the Holocaust, Cenziper said she wants attendees to experience a renewed sense of hope.
 
“I want people to gain a better understanding of the history, but I also want them to leave feeling hopeful and upbeat because there’s a group of men and women out there who spent their whole careers bringing these people to justice,” she said. “Even delayed justice matters.”
 
Cenziper spent 12 years reporting for The Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for a year-long investigation of housing corruption in Miami. She joined the staff at The Washington Post in 2007. She is now writing part-time for the Post and running the investigative reporting program at Northwestern University.
 
The Shusterman Distinguished Scholar Lecture runs from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 12, at Gratz College. Admission is free, but registration is recommended. For more information or to register, click here.