The book has its own unusual history. The four co-authors all served as consulting historians for the Nazi War Criminal and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), a small government organization created to implement the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Working closely with the IWG and with archivists at the U.S. National Archives, we helped with the declassification of approximately 8 million pages of U.S. government records; we examined a significant portion of those records; and over the course of five years we wrote about what we considered the most significant topics illuminated by newly declassified records.

Part of the purpose of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 was to release to the public the remaining archival secrets about U.S. government policies concerning Nazi war crimes and criminals during and after World War II. Some members of the IWG—Thomas Baer, Richard Ben-Veniste, Elizabeth Holtzman, and its first chair Michael Kurtz—decided that independent historians with some expertise in the areas covered by the act were in a better position to assist in contextualizing the new material than were government historians employed by the various affected agencies. We have thus not written as government historians—three of us continue to hold university appointments—but rather as independent scholars. We requested and received the freedom to select our own topics and to adopt our own interpretations. We did not think we could credibly present our versions of history unless we had intellectual independence.