Publisher's Synopsis
Who murdered tens of thousands of Odessa's Jews in World War II? How was this terrible secret kept hidden for over three quarters of a century? And what connects those questions to a small town on the North Dakota prairie? Hitler's Basement provides the answers, as well as offering startling new perspectives on the Holocaust in an isolated region of Ukraine that Hitler called Transnistria. Part detective story, part redemptive quest, Hitler's Basement carries the reader deep into an ethnic labyrinth of guilt and memory to discover links between Soviet terror in the 1930s and the Holocaust in Transnistria, and how relatives of a German-speaking minority who didn't immigrate to the prairie became cogs in the Nazi machinery of death. In a shocking twist, the author traces one of the shadowy executioners to America, to his own Dakota hometown--and, finally, to the edges of his very own family.
