War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kaunas

FROM THE PUBLISHER

War Criminal on Trial is the astonishing true story of Helmut Rauca, the first Nazi war criminal in Canada extradited for war crimes. Arrested by police in 1982, on the charge of aiding and abetting in the murder of more than ten thousand men, women and children in 1941 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Rauca was extradited to stand trial in Frankfurt.
Sol Littman covered the case from the beginning, interviewing the people who knew Rauca: his friends and associates, members of the police whose task it was to hunt him down and, most significantly, survivors of the Kaunas ghetto who remembered Rauca as the SS master sergeant who personally selected thousands of Jews for death.
War Criminal on Trial documents how Rauca found sanctuary in Canada, and how, for over thirty years, he remained undetected. Was there any complicity on the part of government officials in allowing Rauca and other alleged war criminals to enter and remain in Canada? Should Canadians be pursuing aging ex-Nazis? These questions, first raised by this book, are as current as ever.
About the Author:
For the past twelve years, Sol Littman has served as the Canadian Representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In that capacity he played a key role in persuading the Canadian government to appoint a Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (the Deschenes Commission) and to amend Canada's Criminal Code to allow the prosecution of war criminals for crimes committed beyond Canada's borders. He has also provided the Justice Department with numerous lists of Nazi war criminals who found shelter in Canada.

FROM THE CRITICS

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