This grim fact is the jumping-off point for “Elusive Justice” (Tuesday, PBS; check local listings), a documentary by Jonathan Silvers about Holocaust survivors (and victims) and the German war criminals that still weigh on their minds nearly 70 years after the end of the war. Narrated by Candice Bergen, the movie hits some of the expected topics and people, including the Nuremberg Trials and the efforts of Weisenthal (who disliked being called a “Nazi hunter” because so much of his work consisted of sifting through documents) and Asher Ben Natan, who funded and organized ex-Nazi-tracking operations in Europe.

But for the most part, the movie loiters around the edges of the best-known events, delving into stories that we haven’t heard before, and philosophies and feelings we rarely hear articulated in a documentary like this one. And it pays special attention to the mid-level officers, party officials and anonymous citizens who carried out orders from the top. Some of these people fled to other countries after 1945, but most returned to their pre-war lives. One survivor asks, “Why the hell should they sleep like babies while I have nightmares?”

The film contains much unresolved discussion of the difference between justice and vengeance, and how the Nuremberg tribunal was created in order to head off an international wave of vigilante mayhem. A couple of once-persecuted Jews who killed Nazis during and after the war offer a spirited defense of vengeance. At one point the film suggests that despite the noble intent behind the Nuremberg Trials, they might have inadvertently hurt the long-term cause of justice, by making most of the world subconsciously believe that it was all over and the good guys won and there was no need to trouble our minds with any of it.

One of the movie’s subjects is an elderly Viennese man who narrowly survived being euthanized at the notorious Am Spielgelgrund clinic, where children deemed “undesirable” by the government were experimented on or killed and then dissected. In 1997, when the filmmaker was an ABC News producer, he managed to track down Dr. Heinrich Gross, who once ran the clinic, and interviewed him on a public street. “If you didn’t do what you were told, you would have been killed by the Nazis,” the elderly doctor said at the time — the justification of so many mid-level participants in war crimes. Three years after the ABC report aired, the doctor was charged with complicity in mass murder. The trial ended four days after it started when the presiding judge declared Gross medically unfit to stand trial. He died in his home in 2005. “And that was our so-called justice,” says one of the doctor’s victims.

Lest you’ve forgotten any part of this, “Maus” mastermind Art Spiegelman is publishing “MetaMaus” to mark the 25th anniversary of the original. And after a quarter of a century, the work still provokes spellbound fascination and anguish in equal measure.

As a fellow member of the so-called Second Generation, or children of survivors, who’ve written books on the subject so central to our lives, let me attest to how handily the original “Maus” beat us all to the punch. Spiegelman’s first version was actually published 14 years earlier as a three-page underground strip in 1972. To put it in the proper time frame, this was during an era when the word “Holocaust” was scarcely spoken in polite society. The general public was locked in ignorance. Survivors were choked by a sort of guilt-by-association shamefulness. The Eichmann trial was only 11 years in the past; the taboo-breaking Holocaust TV miniseries six years in the future. As a measure of how traumatic the events of World War II were, the American Jewish community as a whole remained so shell-shocked that they had barely begun the supernatural task of processing it. Along came Spiegelman’s distinctly un-Disney-like hordes of mice to jolt us from our complacence, its first volume (“My Father Bleeds History”) in 1986 and its second (“And Here My Troubles Began”) five years later.

Like a director’s commentary track, the new “MetaMaus” provides a kind of behind-the-scenes “Inside ‘Maus’” that rewards us with insights this reviewer, for one, was too blown away to perceive the first time around. It’s built on a very distilled and definitive four-year-long interview with “associate editor” Hilary Chute, who deserves more credit than she receives (she’s not even listed on the front or back covers) for posing exactly the right questions, such as this one: “Were there times when you felt that perhaps comics wasn’t the best medium for your father’s story?”

Answer: “I came up against things in ‘Maus’ that involved imparting general information, and those were the moments when I would despair and think: Well, maybe I should just do something that’s a combination of prose and comics, use comics when it’s appropriate, and just typeset pages of prose when that seemed appropriate. But that would have been a real cop-out.”

And this: “Aside from Expressionism, what aspects of visual or literary modernism have you found productive?”

Answer: “I was interested in the fact that us low artists [i.e.. cartoonists] were the only artists still interested in drawing the human figure when all of modernism was moving away from that.”

The book is filled with similar revelations, such as the eccentric nature of Spiegelman’s influences. These embrace not only the German-born American artist Josef Albers (his “concern with retinal information rather than drawing per se”), but also “Little Orphan Annie” (which “offered me a more direct validation that comics could actually carry emotional resonance despite, or probably because of, the abstraction of the language and visuals”), as well as Mad magazine pioneer Harvey Kurtzman, whose sensibility Spiegelman credits with radicalizing “what we now think of as humor.”

Along the way, Spiegelman provides a glimpse into his years of apprenticeship, as well as a graduate-level course in comics semiotics: not only how eye movement works on the page, frame by frame, but how the graphic architecture serves in specific cases to deliver the narrative. As such, it is nothing less than a treatise on the rhythm and grammar of comics storytelling. The visual vocabulary he utilizes turns out to be more ingenious than you (or I, at least) ever suspected. Who knew, for instance, that on one page the smoke from the narrator’s cigarette was meant to be subconsciously seen as smoke from the crematorium in the panel below? (Another throwaway revelation: “I do believe that the self-destructiveness of my smoking is not totally unrelated to the secondhand memories of secondhand smoke” his parents breathed from the crematoria.)

In fact, Spiegelman doesn’t so much rapid-fire his replies as he chain-smokes them, one after the other, torching one eye-opener from the spark of the previous. On how he managed to condense such encyclopedic information into two volumes: “‘Maus’ could have been ten times longer if I’d just not tried to pack it as tightly.” On why he chose this most daunting of topics to begin with: “My work life has mostly consisted of finding the hardest thing I’m capable of doing to placate the Hanging Judge within. I wanted a challenge worth meeting as I turned thirty, and ‘Maus’ qualified.”

(More about that Hanging Judge: “Drawing doesn’t come easily to me — maybe I’m lazy like my father always told me I was.”)

Most important, he manages to explore the fluidity of the fiction/nonfiction divide that inevitably plagues historic narrative, and to confirm that they are not as easily segregated as naive commentators would have us believe. Acknowledging that “memory is a very fugitive thing,” he cobbles a workable reply to those who insist on its rigidity. “I still puzzle over what fiction and nonfiction really are. Reality is too complex to be threaded out into the narrow channels and confines of narrative and ‘Maus,’ like all other narrative work including memoir, biography, and history presented in narrative form, is streamlined and, at least on that level, a fiction.” To flesh out his point he shares the delicious anecdote of how, before the New York Times Book Review saw the light and acceded to putting the book on the nonfiction side of the bestseller ledger, one benighted editor argued, “Well look, let’s go out to Spiegelman’s house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we’ll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!”

Fortunately, more enlightened minds prevailed. The result has forever helped redefine our attitudes toward history and the art that attends it.

“Death in the City of Light” recounts the infamous case of Marcel Petiot, a physician believed to have killed over 60 people in Paris between 1942 and 1944, under the Nazi occupation of the city. King presents the story as a procedural, beginning with the day in March 1944 when residents in the chic 16th arrondissement complained of a foul smoke billowing out of a neighboring townhouse. When attempts to rouse the house’s inhabitants proved fruitless, the fire department was called. In the basement, they found a coal stove with the “charred remains of a human hand” sticking out of it. Body parts and bones littered the floor. Further police investigations discovered a pit in which numerous corpses in various stages of decay had been covered with quicklime. In total, over 11 pounds of human hair would be gathered from the remains.

If King’s book has a protagonist, it’s police detective Victor Massu (an inspiration for Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret), who picked up the case at the beginning. Determining, capturing and convicting the culprit, however, would prove supremely challenging in a city whose civil institutions were hopelessly compromised under Nazi rule. It was difficult for anyone to sort out wrong from right. For example, the patrolmen initially dispatched to the scene allowed a man claiming to be the brother of the owner to enter the building and take away some undetermined piece of evidence. Why? Because he assured them that the house was a Resistance outpost and that the bodies inside it were the remains of “Germans and traitors to our country.” Later, they learned that the man was in fact Petiot, the house’s owner and the prime suspect.

People were disappearing from Nazi-occupied Paris in droves. Some escaped to Spain and beyond via clandestine networks. Others vanished into the prisons of the Gestapo; you could be arrested for something as simple as wearing red, white and blue on Bastille Day. Above all, the city’s Jewish population was subject to raids and deportations, plucked from their homes or off the streets and loaded into trains destined for death camps, never to be seen again. This made identifying the dismembered and mutilated remains in Petiot’s charnel house extremely difficult, especially given that the parts of the bodies most useful to this process were missing.

King sketches this background in brisk, workmanly prose. At first it seems a bit too workmanly, but as the case evolves into a bizarre farrago of false identities, paranoia, wild goose chases, rumors, secret agendas and outright delusion — all liberally sprinkled with Gallic histrionics — the choice makes perfect sense. Authorial flourishes would be superfluous in a story already replete with penny-dreadful details: a mysterious femme fatale, a coffin stuffed with treasure just before it was interred, a crime boss who “obsessively collected” rare dahlias and orchids and entertained socialites in his lavish townhouse while members of the Resistance were tortured in the cellars beneath, and so on.

The authorities finally caught Petiot after a seven-month search. By then, Paris had been liberated — an event described with crisp brio by King — and Massu had been charged with collaboration, losing his job. (He was later fully exonerated.) The doctor was deliberately goaded into revealing himself by a newspaper that ran the wild testimony of a witness (who later disappeared), alleging that Petiot was a cocaine smuggler who hired prostitutes to have sex with other men while he watched and who wore German uniforms to hunt down Resistance fighters. Outraged, Petiot sent the paper a long, handwritten note filled with clues that led to his apprehension. He was working under a false identity as a captain in the counterespionage service, where he participated in the investigation of his own crimes.

Petiot’s trial gave him further occasion to display his almost superhuman brazenness. He was accused of operating a false “escape agency,” promising to spirit people out of France, then killing them and stealing their valuables. Petiot maintained that he had worked for a Resistance operation, called “Fly-Tox,” that “liquidated” collaborators and informants. He painted his victims — including several Jews fleeing Nazi persecution — as Gestapo agents. He admitted to killing scores of people, just not the ones found in the townhouse. Those corpses, he insisted, had been planted there by the Gestapo in order to frame him.

The trial quickly became a three-ring circus — a situation exacerbated by the French judicial process, which allows civil attorneys hired by victims’ families as well as prosecutors to question witnesses and permits the participants (including the defendant) to interrupt testimony and statements. The quick-witted Petiot lambasted his enemies with barbed jokes and accusations of collaboration, capitalizing on the uneasiness everyone felt in the aftermath of the war. He nearly came to blows with one attorney while on the stand.

Petiot was not the only one to misbehave. Incredibly, the presiding magistrate was quoted describing the accused as “an unbelievable demon” and “an appalling murderer” in the press while the trial was in process and yet no mistrial was declared. The public fought over spots in the overflowing courtroom, then camped out, munching on sausages and sandwiches and shouting remarks like spectators at a sporting match. It was the best show in town. The writer Colette turned up to report on the trial, and such luminaries as Prince Rainier of Monaco and the duke of Windsor requested seats.

King has unearthed new evidence (a first-person account of the early days of the investigation written by Massu not long after the trial) to counter the widespread assumption that Petiot killed his victims via lethal injections. He also suspects that Petiot had powerful protectors in the Occupation regime and presents a convincing case for those suspicions. But the most startling impression left by “Death in the City of Light,” is of Paris itself, confronting the bestiality lurking behind its supremely civilized facade, and of the handful of Parisiennes who tried to serve justice in spite of it.

“Failing republics”! Why does Joseph Farah not believe in American exceptionalism?

Also, I know this is entirely beside the point, but: Hitler wasn’t ever elected president. He was appointed chancellor by German President Paul von Hindenburg. (The “loophole” that allowed Hitler to assume that office was that he legally obtained German citizenship.) When Hindenburg died, Hitler left the presidency vacant and (illegally) assumed the power of the office, but not the title. In other words: Hitler, who was legally eligible to be the president of Germany, was never the president of Germany.

Joseph Farah can’t even competently compare Obama to Hitler. This is basic wingnut stuff!

That’s the point. In the book’s prologue, Larson tells of his long-standing interest in what it was like to witness the “gathering dark of Hitler’s rule.” Certain perceptive individuals could see exactly where Germany was going, but the vast majority did not. You could even say that the rise of the Third Reich is primarily a story about what regular people failed to notice or to take seriously until it was too late. The two Americans Larson has chosen to focus on in this book are William Dodd, who was the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his daughter, Martha, who socialized with many crucial figures of the period.

“In the Garden of Beasts” dwells primarily on the first year of Dodd’s tenure in Berlin, from the summer of 1933, when the ambassador and his family arrived, willing to give the new government the benefit of the doubt and stirred by Germany’s mood of energetic renewal, to the summer of 1934, when they were utterly disillusioned and repulsed. The climactic event is the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934, when Hitler ordered a political purge that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of his critics and rivals, many of them friends and acquaintance of the Dodds.

William and Martha Dodd weren’t entirely ordinary people, of course, but neither were they especially shrewd or insightful. The chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago, Dodd was something like seventh or eighth on FDR’s list of candidates for the post; none of the others wanted the job. Intelligent and hardworking, a “Jefferson Democrat” with a penchant for amateur farming and a man of unimpeachable integrity, Dodd had hoped for an assignment to an undemanding country like Belgium, where he’d have the time to work on his magnum opus, a history of the antebellum South. He was ambivalent from the start, claiming not to be “the sly, two-faced type so necessary to ‘lie abroad for the country.’” That’s a pretty fair self-assessment; he had little gift for diplomacy.

Martha was in her mid-20s, pretty and bright but (by her own measure) “flighty.” She’d been the assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune and had an affair with Carl Sandburg and a deep friendship with Thornton Wilder. An old friend compared her to Scarlett O’Hara — another fair assessment, as she made a habit of flirting and playing her suitors off against each other. By the time she decided to accompany her father to Berlin, Martha already had a secret marriage under her belt, although she and her banker husband were estranged.

In Berlin, Martha’s escapades (she had affairs with several Nazis, including Rudolf Diels, the first commander of the Gestapo, and one of her ex-lovers even tried to fix her up with Hitler) quietly scandalized the locals. “I must have appeared a most naive and stubborn young American, a vexation to all sensible people I knew,” she would later observe. She was also swayed by the theater of Nazi politics (which was designed to appeal to adolescent mentalities exactly like hers), writing to Wilder: “Wholesome and beautiful lads, these Germans, good, sincere, healthy, mystic, brutal, fine, hopeful, capable of death and love, deep, rich, wondrous and strange these youths.”

Her father had a leveler head — perhaps too level. His great weakness, according to Larson, was that he saw the world “as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people.” Although born and educated in the South, he resembled the quintessential Midwesterner: industrious, conscientious, principled and self-effacing but also a bit dull. It did not help that he harbored what Larson calls a “rudimental anti-Semitism” and once told the German foreign minister, “We have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.” Like many, many Americans at that time, Dodd expected Hitler’s reign to be short-lived and regarded reports of Nazi persecution and harassment as exaggerations or isolated incidents.

Their first year in Berlin stripped both Dodds of such comforting illusions. (Dodd’s wife and grown son were also with them, but William and Martha left the most extensive written accounts of their German years.) Martha, whose circle included both members and critics of the regime, finally got the message when she and a dissident friend paid a visit to the author Hans Fallada, who had supposedly come to some sort of accommodation with the Nazis. “I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer’s face for the first time,” she recalled, although considering some of what she had witnessed before that, she could well be faulted for not taking the terrorizing of non-writers more seriously. Martha also commenced a passionate affair with a staff member of the Soviet embassy, and this stoked her growing interest in communism. (He turned out to have considerably mixed motives.)

William Dodd eventually grasped what he was dealing with in Germany, although he held out hope that Hitler would self-moderate for a surprisingly long time. It was seeing the Führer fume maniacally about “the Jews” that finally impressed the truth on him. After he returned from Berlin, Dodd went on speaking tours around the States, warning his fellow Americans of Hitler’s murderous, imperialist intent and the futility of isolationism; it would earn him a reputation for foresight. However, the U.S. consul general, George S. Messersmith, knew all of this even before Dodd arrived in Germany, and sent many similar warnings back to Washington, to little effect. The administration and Congress were preoccupied with the Depression and the droughts that had turned the prairie states into dust bowls; their priority was coaxing the Germans into repaying the millions of dollars they’d borrowed from American creditors.

Why did it take Dodd so long to wise up? Partly, you just had to be there for a while, as Messersmith had, but the ambassador was also distracted. “In the Garden of Beasts” provides an excellent case study in the folly of sweating the little stuff. Dodd was often caught up in battling the “Pretty Good Club,” a cadre of wealthy men who accepted ambassadorial appointments and maintained lavish standards of living and entertaining in foreign capitals. The frugal Dodd wished to make the State Department more “democratic” and practical, and insisted on living on his own humble salary. He also squandering any store of good will back home by perpetually scolding his colleagues for their profligacy — lengthy international cables made him particularly irate.

The State Department’s elitism was a real problem, so Dodd had a point. It’s just that it was a relatively trivial point compared to the threat posed by the Nazis’ burgeoning power and militarism. The patricians back home, not surprisingly, bridled at his nagging and wrote him off as a tedious, penny-pinching prig who lack the imposing style required to bring the Germans to heel. When he really needed their help and support, he would find himself flapping in the wind.

Whether Dodd could have done much to restrain Hitler isn’t clear — Larson seems to think not. When he finally understood what he needed to do, he certainly tried his best, and behaved with courage. Perhaps a man more suited to “lie for the country” (in other words, a worldlier person with more charm) might have made a difference. At the very least, William and Martha Dodd’s story serves as a reminder of how easy it is to be mistaken about what really matters.