The hunt for Nazis was a truly transnational undertaking. It involved actors from Eastern and Western Europe, from North and South America, and not the least from Israel. Therefore, following the publication of the German original in 2013, I started to think about ways to make this story accessible to readers in as many countries as possible. I was encouraged by the reactions to my book. Newspapers and journals in Germany and abroad kept showing a keen interest in my findings. In 2013, the book also received the Opus Primum Award of the VolkswagenStiftung.

But as plausible as these reasons may seem, this translation never would have materialized without the generous support of Dr Nicolaus-Jürgen Weickart. When we spoke about my book during a conference dinner, he encou raged me with great emphasis to tackle the project of a translation. I am very grateful to him and his wife Dr Christiane Weickart for enabling the Jena Center of 20th-Century History to hire Jefferson Chase to translate the book. He turned out to be an extremely fortunate choice. As a highly accomplished translator of history books – he recently translated a much lauded biography of Adolf Hitler –, his version of The Hunt for Nazis is much more than ‘just’ a translation. I almost think that the English version turned out to be a more readable book than the German original. I am also thankful that Christoph Renner relieved me from the task to change the citations to Chicago style.

When I talked to Professor Dr Peter Romijn about the possibility to publish this book with a Dutch press, he immediately offered his support. Only a few months later, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam) decided to include The Hunt for Nazis in its book series. I would like to thank Peter Romijn, Ingrid de Zwarte, and the editorial board for their support. I also thank Inge van der Bijl and Jaap Wagenaar from AUP for working with me on the book.

Since The Hunt for Nazis was published in German, historians have made significant progress in several relevant fields: in Germany's coping with the Nazi past, the globalization of Holocaust memory, Latin American dictatorships and processes of democratization, and human rights history.