Eric Stover ’74 Pursues War Criminals in “Hiding in Plain Sight”
By Joy Li ’18

Eric Stover ’74, faculty director at the Human Rights Center of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, recently published “Hiding in Plain Sight” with two of his Ph. D. mentees, Victor Peskin and Alexa Koenig.

“Hiding In Plain Sight” discusses the flights of war criminals throughout modern history and the range of diplomatic and military strategies to capture them. It starts with the stories of the post-war escapes of Nazis such as Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz physician who was known as the “Angel of Death” and Adolf Eichmann, the infamous initiator of the “final solution” and ends with today’s high-level suspects like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Stover says he first gained interest in perpetrators of wartime atrocities when he held the bones of Josef Mengele in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “Standing there looking at the skeleton, I thought, ‘How could it be that this war criminal, who fled Auschwitz in 1945, could end up here on the other side of the earth? And what about all the other Nazis who were walking free in Latin America, where were they and why hadn’t they been caught?’”

He continued his investigations of wartime leaders who escaped, successfully or unsuccessfully. Six years after, he co-authored and published “Hiding in Plain Sight,” which is also the companion book of the PBS documentary that he co-produced, “Dead Reckoning: Postwar Justice from World War II to The War on Terror,” which is scheduled to air in December. Additionally, his book and the work Stover did in Bosnia was recently featured by Christiane Amanpour on CCN.

As the author of over seven books, when asked to provide writing insight for CC students and faculty, Stover said: “Writing has no magic, it is simply inspiration, diligence, and many lonely hours of solitude as you rewrite and rewrite your copy first for yourself, then your readers, and finally to add a good dollop of spit and polish. And, of course, don’t forget to always check your sources and remember the advice of the Cornish writer and author of “On the Art of Writing,” Arthur Quiller-Couch: ‘In writing, you must kill your darlings.’ Then go for a hike in the Garden of the Gods.”