Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 16, 2025

The American Covert Operative Who Survived Mauthausen

“If we try to tell them, they will say it is propaganda.”

Although the recent film Nuremberg is a fictionalized account of the famous war-crimes trials that took place in the city of the title, it includes some documentary footage—with a voiceover by Lieutenant Jack Taylor. An agent of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (later transformed into the CIA), Taylor participated in a bungled clandestine mission in 1944 in which he and his comrades parachuted into Austria. The Nazis captured Taylor in 1944, and sent him to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was put to work building crematoria. Mitchell Bard describes his experiences there: 

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