Terrence Petty's Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies is a damning and wide-ranging investigation into post world war II Germany's penchant for placing former Nazis in high positions in various German government agencies.

Other books have taken up the subject of the American blind eye to war crimes when it was to the benefit of the space race or the cold war against the Soviet Union, here it is centered specifically on the dawn of a new democratic age in Germany. Post war there was supposed to be a process of denazification, that was rapidly moved from US and Allied control, to German control. Already weak, it became farcical. Instead Germany embraced a forgetting of the bad times, leading to a generational "amnesia" or avoidance to search to hard into a candidates background.

Across the chapters Petty explores important and tainted figures within different governmental agencies, compromised figures forced or willingly serving as Soviet or double agents and the careers of anti Hitler dissidents who should have had more opportunity in the post war government. There are a lot of figures named and biographed, and at times this can feel like something of a recitation. The 15 chapters are semi-chronologically, divided into two sections. The first, American Culpability, lays out the process by which outside the Nuremberg trials most Nazis were let off the hook for their crimes. Part 2, "Second Guilt" narrates the upending of the Cold War fueled amnesia and the long delayed reckoning with those guilty of war crimes and the attempts to seek justice.

Petty brings it to the present discussing more recent operations against extremist elements in the German police and military and the ongoing alarming inward focus of nationalist parties. It is a hard read, though very timely.

Recommended for readers and researchers of Post wwII Europe, history, German History or the Cold War.

Thank you to NetGalley for this e-copy of Nazis at the Watercooler by Terrence Petty in exchange for a honest review this is is a well-researched and well -written non- fiction account of how numerous ex-Nazis were able to infiltrate various departments of the East and mostly West German government and hold jobs without being held to account for the numerous wartime atrocities they had committed .It is shocking there was so much collusion as Germany tried to bury its past in hopes that people would forget.about all the havoc the Nazis had wreaked When many of these officials were finally charged in the 1960s they were given light sentences and when these people were again investigated in the early 2000s most of these officials had passed away or were physically or mentally unable to stand trial.This book casts a bad light on the German government and how they were unable to accept responsibility for their wartime actions.