Interview with author John Connolly

Over a number of years I’d become interested in the hunt for the last of the old Nazis, particularly in the US.  It came out of following the case of a man named Hans Breyer, who was accused of being a guard at Auschwitz, leading the US authorities to spend many years trying to extradite him to Germany to face trial.  Breyer died the night before he was to be put on the plane, so he escaped justice at the last.  I had assumed that the Allies spend decades hunting these people since the end of WWII, but in fact there was no interest in making them face trial for at least thirty years, largely because the Allies struck a deal with the worst of them in return for information about the Soviet Union.  It was a massive moral collapse, and so A Song of Shadows is an exploration of that collapse.