Norbert Frei (Editor) Karrieren im Zwielicht. Hitlers Eliten nach 1945 (Careers in the Half-Light: Hitler's Elite after 1945) Campus Verlag , 2001. 320pp. illustrated. ISBN 3-593-36790-4 Norbert Frei was born in 1955, ten years after the end of the war in Europe. He is therefore in a position, like Ian Kershaw in his mammoth, two-volume Hitler, to see his subject through fresh eyes, unblinkered by the natural prejudices of those who lived through those events. But his subject is as important now as then, important for Germans still trying to come to terms with their past and for all those puzzled by the paradox of the Nazis' henchmen, not of world-famous rank but drawn from many walks of life, who prospered not only under Hitler but after his fall. This is the first thorough attempt to follow the careers of such people. Each chapter of the book has been written by an eminent historian, who will present his material in a German TV series early in 2002. The villains singled out are divided into professions: journalists, doctors, judges, entrepreneurs, military officers. Their prewar and wartime activities are described in full, revealing in every case abuses of human rights - from medical experiments in the camps downwards. As their careers are followed after 1945 it becomes clear that what initially enabled them to resurface was that the structures of society needed them. There would have been, for instance, too few teachers to staff postwar German schools if some former members of the Nazi party had not been brought back. The German trials following the main set-piece at Nuremberg are critically examined. Their amnesties and exonerations brought many lice out of the woodwork, a chairman of the Deutsche Bank being just one. The military officers held their heads as high as before, the journalists merely disguised their old song, the entrepreneurs became, as the heading of the chapter devoted to them puts it, 'Profiteers of Injustice'. As for the judges, one is on record as having handed down death sentences brazenly and blatantly to punish the accused for their politics. Uncomfortable reading though it will certainly be for some, this is investigative journalism at its necessary and salutary best.