How a dedicated band of Allied soldiers hunted down every last member of Hitlers evil inner circle

Adolf Hitler’s war on the world ended with him blowing his brains out as Russia’s Red Army closed in on his bunker.But what happened to his accomplices in the Nazi terror after the apocalypse in Berlin?Charles Lachman’s latest, “They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich’s Most Wanted” (Diversion Books, Sept.

1) is the gripping story of the morning after.The guns fell silent in Europe on May 8, 1945.But the war didn’t stop there.

And not just because American forces were fighting a bloody battle for Okinawa that day, with another three months’ hard fighting still to come in the Pacific theater.Tens of thousands of Germans wanted to keep fighting for the Fatherland.On the wall of Gen.Eisenhower’s headquarters was a map of the “mountainous, impregnable terrain” of Bavaria, the Nazi heartland, and Austria.

This was the diehards’ “National Redoubt.”On May 3, 1945, three days after Hitler’s cronies torched his corpse in the garden of the Führerbunker, a group of senior Nazis met secretly at a lakeside villa in the Austrian mountains.They included Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS general and chief of the Reich Security Main Office, which ran the Gestapo; and Otto Skorzeny, the scarfaced commando leader who was, Lachman writes, a “one-man Nazi war machine.”Not forgetting Kaltenbrunner’s old friend Adolf Eichmann, the bespectacled bureaucrat who planned the genocide of Europe’s Jews and made sure the trains ran on time.Their plan: to undermine the Allied occupation by unleashing the Werewolves, a guerilla force of as many as 200,000 Nazi loyalists.They were prepared to unleash “a fanatical fight to the end.

Hitler’s Gotterdammerung — the twilight of the Gods.”They weren’t the only eminent Nazis to escape the Allies’ advance.The American and British conquerors were in a race against time. Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, was running for Austria with a convoy of flunkies and loot. Hitler’s chie...