Erika Mann drove through the night to meet the fifty-two most wanted men in the world. It was the middle of August 1945 and she was a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday. Streaks of gray were beginning to show in her short brown hair. She gripped the steering wheel with gloved hands, only raising them to light cigarette after cigarette, which she smoked out of the corner of her mouth. She was thin but far from frail in her signature attire of trousers and flat, practical shoes. As night swallowed up the road ahead, her dark eyes had a singular intensity of focus.

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The previous afternoon in Paris, Mann had been commissioned by London’s Evening Standard to write a story that would start to make sense of over a decade of suffering. The eldest daughter of Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann, Erika was a writer and performer of rare commitment. She had staged an anti-Nazi cabaret in Munich in 1933 and broadcast for the BBC since 1940.…