Not all Nazis followed the path of Joseph Goebbels, who chose suicide rather than face life without the Führer. Many others, including some directly responsible for implementing the "Final Solution," fled Germany in the hope of eluding judgment.

Helped by secret networks of Nazi sympathizers, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Josef Mengele, along with untold others, escaped to South America. Eichmann, the SS "Jewish expert," fled to Argentina, but was eventually located and spirited out of the country by Israeli security agents. Stangl, commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps, escaped first to Syria with the aid of a sympathetic Catholic bishop and then journeyed to Brazil. For 16 years he lived there with his family, using his own name and working in a Volkswagen factory, until war-crimes investigators finally extradited him for trial in Germany.

Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor known as the "Angel of Death," found asylum in Argentina. Facing extradition, he hid in Brazil and Paraguay, managing to avoid capture. He died a free man in 1978. Others, including concentration- and death-camp guards, joined the swell of refugees who immigrated to the United States, building new lives and escaping prosecution for their crimes. In the summer of 1998, Argentina signed an accord with Germany, Israel, and the United States to share information about Nazis still at large in Argentina.

Even when they are about immensely important subjects such as the Holocaust, 600-page history books rarely get the attention received by Hitler's Willing Executioners. Finding his conclusions at odds with their own, most Holocaust scholars in the United States, Europe, and Israel have not given Goldhagen marks to match the high sales figures that his book enjoyed.