On 6 June 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy. The invasion followed several years of argument and planning by Allied leaders, who remained committed to a return to the European continent after the Germans had forced the Allies to evacuate at Dunkirk in May 1940. Before the spring of 1944, however, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other British leaders remained unconvinced that the invasion was feasible. At the Teheran Conference in November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promised Josef Stalin that Allied troops would launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, in the spring. Because of their continuing concerns about Overlord, the British convinced the Americans to implement a cover plan to help ensure the invasion's success. The London Controlling Section (LCS) devised an elaborate two-part plan called Operation Fortitude that SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) helped to fine tune and that both British and American forces implemented. Historians analyzing the Normandy invasion frequently devote some discussion to Operation Fortitude. Although they admit that Fortitude North did not accomplish all that the Allied deception planners had hoped, many historians heap praise on Fortitude South, using phrases such as, "unquestionably the greatest deception in military history." Many of these historians assume that the deception plan played a crucial role in the June 1944 assault. A reexamination of the sources suggests, however, that other factors contributed as much, if not more, to the Allied victory in Normandy and that Allied forces could have succeeded without the elaborate deception created by the LCS. Moreover, thepersistent tendency to exaggerate the operational effect of Fortitude on the German military performance at Normandy continues to draw attention away from other, technical-military reasons for the German failures there.

In the 1970s, news broke that former Nazis had escaped prosecution and were living the good life in the United States. Outrage swept the nation, and the public outcry put extreme pressure on the U.S. government to investigate these claims and to deport offenders. The subsequent creation of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) marked the official beginning of Nazi-hunting in the United States, but it was far from its end. Thirty some years later, in November 2010, the New York Times obtained a copy of a confidential 2006 report by the Justice Department titled "The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust." The six-hundred-page report held shocking secrets regarding the government's botched attempts to hunt and persecute Nazis in the United States and its willingness to harbor and even employ these criminals after World War II. Drawing from this report alongside other sources, Spies, Lies, and Citizenship by Mary Kathryn Barbier exposes scandalous new information about infamous Nazi fugitives including Josef Mengele, Andrija Artukovic, Arthur Rudolph, Karl Waldheim, and Klaus Barbie, sheltered and protected in the United States and beyond, and the ongoing attempts to bring the remaining Nazis to justice.