Patricia Posner

I am London born, having spent half my life in Britain and half in the United States. For thirty years I have worked on 12 books of investigative historical nonfiction with my husband, bestselling author Gerald Posner. On those projects, I conduct every interview with him, sift through thousands of pages of original documents in government and private archives, and work on the early drafts of manuscripts and also the editing. As a 2009 St. Petersburg Times profile of Gerald correctly noted: "Trisha Posner works with him on his books and joins him in his interviews, but refuses co-author credit." I have always been greatly interested in the history surrounding World War II and the Holocaust. I had been long been fascinated by the mostly untold story of Victor Capesius, an ethnic German from Romania who ended up as the chief pharmacist at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp. I learned about him in 1985 when working with Gerald on his biography of the Nazi Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele (Mengele). During later projects assisting Gerald I was able to delve further into World War II and the Holocaust. In 1991 there was a book collection of interviews with the children of Nazi perpetrators (Hitler’s Children); in 1994 a New Yorker article "Letter from Berlin: Secrets of the Files," in which Gerald and I were two of the last researchers allowed full access to the millions of Nazi party membership files in the Berlin Document Center prior to the U.S. transfer of those papers to German custody; and in 2015 another book investigation, this time into the Vatican Bank and how the Catholic Church profited from the Holocaust by secret investments into German and Italian insurance companies that escheated the life insurance policies of Jews sent to Auschwitz (God’s Bankers). While collecting information about Capesius over the years, I also launched my own solo writing career. In the late 1990s I started a monthly column about developments in women’s health. Having come from a family with a long history of breast cancer, I was highly skeptical of the general pharmaceutical and medical advice that all women should rely on hormone replacement (HRT) for menopause. In 2000, Random House/Villard published my memoir casting doubts on the efficacy of universally prescribed HRT and presented my program for passing through menopause naturally. In 2003, after the landmark medical study, the Women's Health Initiative, was published and confirmed many of the alarming health risks I had addressed in my book, Villard published an updated paperback titled No Hormones, No Fear. From 2005 to 2007 I wrote two columns for Miami's Ocean Drive magazine, one about developments in health and the other covering everything from local politics to battles over historic preservation to a much cited profile of magazine editor Tina Brown. I have also written for Salon, Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast, as well as having appeared to discuss my reporting, among others, on NBC's TODAY, FOX's The O'Reilly Factor, and MSNBC. My biography about Capesius (The Pharmacist of Auschwitz: The Untold Story) is the ideal juncture for my interest in the history about World War II and the Holocaust and my earlier reporting about the pharmaceutical industry and public health. Capesius, a national sales representative for Bayer Pharmaceuticals before the war in Romania, found himself at Auschwitz selecting his former Jewish medical customers for the gas chambers and overseeing some of the medical experiments funded by German Pharma. After the war, with enough dental gold he had stolen from Auschwitz, he opened a pharmacy. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter @trishaposner or about my new book, @AuschwitzPharm1. You can also subscribe to me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/trishaposner or like my book page at https://www.facebook.com/ausch.pharm And check my website at www.trishaposner.com