Many people aided me in the research for this book. First and foremost, I want to thank the wonderful staff of Stewart Memorial Library at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I am particularly grateful to Richard Doyle, Jill Jack, and Sara Pitcher for their assistance in helping me navigate the William L. Shirer collection. Each time I visited the library to work in the collection, the staff graciously invited me to their regular events in the library, including lunches and parties, and refilled my coffee cup—as long as I kept it away from the archives. Rich even lent me one of his bicycles so I could ride the extensive network of trails built atop an old railroad bed in Cedar Rapids. Our relationship began as research librarians helping a journalist; we ended this project as great friends.
I am very grateful to John Chaimov, a gifted professor at Coe College, who introduced me to one of his students, Nina Carlson, who helped translate documents found in the Shirer collection that related to the desperate efforts of a Viennese photographer named Helene Katz to flee Austria in the fall of 1938. Nina’s and John’s work with these documents shed light on the fate of a Jewish woman, just one of so many caught up in the hatred and madness after the Anschluss in March 1938. John and Nina brought the story of Helene Katz out into the open. They saved her name. There is something noble about that.
I want to thank the staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and particularly senior historian Ann Millin. In Vienna, a number of researchers helped me, including Katja Maria Chladek, David Forster, and Susanne Uslu-Pauer; Austrian journalist Anton Holzer also helped with interviews he conducted with a friend of Helene Katz’s. I am grateful to David Lewin and Lilian Levy in London; in New York, Valery Bazarov, the director of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s History and Location Service, helped me trace Katz’s movements; in Jerusalem, Shaul Ferrero at Yad Vashem helped me to discover that there were two women from Vienna named Helene Katz—one who was deported to Poland and murdered at Belzec, the second the photographer whose letters to William L. Shirer were found in the Shirer collection archives. If anyone who reads this book can help me learn the fate of the photographer Helene Katz after she fled Austria, please let me know.
I want to thank two wonderful friends, Donald Mace Williams and his wife, Nell Williams, for their very careful reading of the manuscript as it limped along toward completion. I do not know of two better people to work with on a book than Don and Nell, nor two sharper eyes. I also want to thank Michael V. Carlisle and Ethan Bassoff at Inkwell Management for enthusiastically getting behind the book’s proposal and finding it a home at Palgrave Macmillan, where Luba Ostashevsky and her team masterfully guided it to publication. The copyediting of Georgia Maas and the very careful attention to detail by production manager Donna Cherry were superb.
Lastly, I want to thank William L. Shirer’s and Tess Shirer’s two daughters, Linda Rae and Eileen Inga Dean. Their support of the preservation of their father’s huge archive, and of serious research into it, is a lasting testament to their parents. They have kept their parents’ memories alive. There is something noble about that.