My nominee for the scariest movie is an 85-minute German TV movie, later released in American movie theaters. The Wannsee Conference draws its script from the minutes of the January 20 meeting called by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi …
A beautiful American lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Mildred Fish, married Arvid Harnack, a visiting Rockefeller Foundation fellow and returned with him to Germany in 1929. In 1942, she was tried as a member of the “Red Orchestra,” a …
Many considerations affect the choice of characters’ names. Are they memorable? Do you have too many characters whose names begin with J? Is the name appropriate for the age and birthplace of a character. I tried to consider the first …
Have you noticed that I never use the term “Nazi” in Thieves of Paris? I had been very careful where I used Nazi and where I used German in the first draft, since not all Germans were Nazis—and not all …
When I planned a research trip to France for Thieves of Paris in 2014, before the ISIS attack, my brother asked me why I couldn’t just do my research on the Internet and from my home near Washington, DC. He …
How did Thieves of Paris come to life? Monuments Men recently showed the grand scale of art theft carried out by the Nazis in France and introduces a real heroine who appears in my book–Rose Valland, the only French person …