Interrogations at Bad Nenndorf consequently became a crucial source of information. They provided information on a range of subjects, such as Soviet scientific research and technology, most importantly atomic research, and the Soviet intelligence services. They also provided, as one report noted in 1947, "as complete an Order of Battle for the Red Army" as was possible to obtain at the time. Several suspected Soviet agents were interrogated at Bad Nenndorf, providing "unassailable evidence of Russian espionage within the British Zone in Germany", as Stephens put it.

The Cold War made it extremely difficult to bring Nazi war criminals to justice or to demand compensation from companies which had profited from slave labour. In the rush to recruit West Germany as a fully fledged anti-Communist ally, the United States acceded to demands from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for the early release of arch-criminals such as Edmund Veesenmayer. Sentenced to 20 years for his activities as Nazi supremo in Budapest at the time when half a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz or sent on death marches, he was released after only two years. With relatively few exceptions, academics who had served the Nazis, including Nazi historians, were reinstated. In May 1951, the Adenauer government passed a law reinstating civil servants (except for Gestapo officials) who had been dismissed after the fall of Hitler for their services to the Nazi regime.

Eric Lichtblau's recent book The Nazis Next Door: How America  Became A Safe Haven For Hitler's Men (Houghton Mifflin, £18.46) throws important light on how the Cold War prevented a just reckoning for the Holocaust.

This is not a new theme. It was the subject of the Spencer Tracy film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Tom Bower's classic 1981 study Blind Eye to Murder, Alti Rodal's highly censored 1986 report carried out for the Deschenes Commission into readier admission of former Nazis than of Jews into post-war Canada, Christopher Simpson's vital investigative work Blowback (1988), and several works by John Loftus. Following the selective declassification of records under the terms of legislation enacted under the presidency of Bill Clinton, the US National Archives published in 2010 a discussion of "a sample of newly released records" by Richard Breitman and Norman Goda titled Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War.

Nevertheless, the topic has received far too little attention. The Nazis Next Door adds to the literature in two important ways. It provides valuable information of the belated, much hampered efforts of a small unit within the US Department of Justice, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), to bring to account even a small number of elderly Nazi perpetrators, or alleged perpetrators, living in the US.

 Moreover, Lichtblau uses his narrative skills as a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter for the New York Times to give a compelling account of the realities of the work of the Nazi-hunters within the US Department of Justice. They frequently faced a needle-in-a-haystack search to track down former Nazis admitted to the US many years before. They had to overcome Central Intelligence Agency resistance to releasing records. In the words of Harry Rositzke, who headed the CIA's spy section in Munich in the early 1950s, "It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist." It was hardly surprising that the CIA, reluctant at the best of times to release information, was particularly resistant to admit its use of Nazi war criminals during the Cold War.

Once they had located their targets, the Nazi-hunters in the OSI still had to find evidence sufficient to mount a robust legal case. After the passage of many years, identification of suspects by their former victims could be unreliable. False accusations could undermine the entire exercise of bringing Holocaust perpetrators to justice.