Want fewer ads?

Yaron Svoray is an Israeli author and investigative journalist whose six-month infiltration of Germany’s neo-Nazi groups was documented in his book In Hitler’s Shadow, co-written with Nick Taylor. The investigation brought Svoray into contact with key neo-Nazi leaders, his book revealed a surprisingly large network of seemingly normal middle-class citizens who subscribe to the Nazi platform of racial hatred and superiority, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. In addition Svoray discovered several instances of police collaboration with the extremists. Furthermore, there was evidence that the German groups had managed to forge links with similar groups in South America and the United States.

Svoray’s book In Hitler’s Shadow was later adapted into a 1995 HBO special, The Infiltrator, starring Oliver Platt as Svoray.

To the general public Svoray is probably best known for his hunt of Nazi era diamonds. Svoray’s search was documented on the History Channel’s special Blood from a Stone, which was based on the book, Blood from a Stone, written by Svoray and Richard Hammer and published by the Tor Books division of St. Martin’s Press.

Svoray also wrote the book Gods of Death with screenwriter Thomas Hughes, published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster. The book is a lightly dramatized account of Svoray’s hunt for the source of and sense behind the snuff film he saw while writing his first book. Svoray presented himself as a middleman first for buyers and then for dealers of snuff films, trying to fake his way into the highly secretive industry, at several points running afoul of the Russian mob in Israel and various criminal organizations in the US and Southeast Asia.

Svoray has found a dumping ground for the destroyed remains of Jewish property plundered during Kristallnacht. The dump, situated in a forest in Brandenburg, is the size of four football pitches. It is thought to contain an extensive range of personal and ceremonial items, although only a small number of items have been dug up so far.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Yaron Svoray", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0