By David Strom
SAN DIEGO — A few months before the surrender of Nazi Germany two unlikely associates were sitting and cordially drinking liquor together in Switzerland. One was Nazi General Karl Wolff the right hand to SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the other the top US spy in charge of gathering wartime intelligence on Hitler.
The future leader of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and his friendly meeting with the Nazi general persuaded the general to get the Nazi SS under his command in Italy “to lay down their arms early- before what appeared to be the inevitable German surrender.” The SS under Nazi General Wolff’s ordered a surrender just six days before the full collapse of the Nazi regime.
From the viewpoint of Allen Dulles, the chief American spy in wartime Europe, Nazi general Wolff was a good Nazi. The new enemies were not the “old “Nazis, but rather, the Soviets. This sadly became the prevailing perspective within the CIA apparatus.
While the Jewish Holocaust refugees found it difficult to leave behind the “displaced person” (DP), many Nazis found it much easier to leave for safe haven in South America, Australia, Middle East, Canada, and/or the United States.
Conditions in the DP camps were horrible after the war. President Truman, when he heard about the deplorable conditions in these camps, sent Earl Harrison, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, to investigate the situation at the camps. His blistering report concluded, “As matters now stand we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.”
When General George S. Patton learned of the Harrison report, he remarked, “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”
Unfortunately some in the US Government shared these Nazi attitudes, thus making it easier for former Nazis to immigrate here than it did for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. One of the ways it was easier for Nazis to enter our country was through Project Paperclip.
Project Paperclip brought over 1,600 Nazi scientists into the United States. Their applications were white-washed to make these scientists appear to be “good Nazis” who were not involved in murdering, starving or enslaving workers in the building or production of the V2 rockets that dropped bombs on cities in Britain. Along with the rocket scientists came doctors who had performed medical experiments on Jewish slave laborers.
Each person allowed in through this dishonest and illegal practice took away from the legitimate quota allowed the Jewish refugee. Another way (and many more arrived this way) was to shove the Jewish DP aside to let in former Eastern European Nazi national collaborators who were involved in rounding up, starving, beating, marching thousands of children, women, men, and then killing and dumping them in mass graves.
With their newly found loyalty to the USA, these white-washed former Nazis settled and blended into their new lives as rocket scientists or their work as CIA spies or FBI agents trying to uncover American communists and/or Eastern European communists.
Most lived their lives out of the limelight or glare of the media. They could have been someone’s helpful next-door neighbor, or drinking buddy. They fit right in.
For many years after the war “out of sight, out of mind” was the government approach to the Nazis among us. Israel’s capture of Eichmann changed the political atmosphere somewhat. But it wasn’t until an American left-wing journalist Charles Allen, a Quaker, began investigating the Nazis next door that the inactions against Nazis here began to slowly change.
Allen published two articles in a small leftist Jewish Currents (still published today) about Nazis living freely in the US. He organized protests in Chicago and Brooklyn in 1963. Allen was a hard-hitting writer and did not make distinctions between those who sympathized and those that carried out the deed. He was not averse to calling a “leading figure in Chicago with the Catholic Church—a bishop” a Nazi. Allen cited secret SS report on the murder of sixteen hundred Lithuanians in 1941, revealing that “…the Nuremberg report included a particularly chilling line on the clergyman’s wartime role: ‘Bishop Brizgys has forbidden all clergy to aid Jews in any way.’ ”
The protests and demonstrations did not lead to much public reaction—but it did lead to over a thousand-page secret FBI file on Allen. However, life for Nazis here went on almost normally. But the tumultuous seventies changed all that.
A renewed interest in finding Nazis among us eventually took hold. A feisty New York lawyer Elizabeth Holtzman was elected to Congress in 1972. She was shocked by the government’s indifference towards Nazis living their comfortable lives in the US. She recognized that different parts of the government had aided in bringing and protecting known Nazis. Holtzman was livid and viewed it as blot on American justice system.
Holtzman and other members of Congress put a lot of pressure on the INS to look into its past with regard to immigrant Nazis. An ABC miniseries, Holocaust, brought genocide into the open. The new book Wanted named names, places and dates. “Survivors were becoming increasingly vocal in demanding justice for Nazi survivors.
In 1976 in San Diego, reporters went to a ranch house of a high-school track coach named Edgars Laipenicks and “confronted him with evidence that he had collaborated with the Nazis as a police officer in Latvia.” Laipenicks denied helping round up and “killing Jews and Communist civilians as a part of a Nazi militia. While the reporters were invited into Laipenicks’ home they noticed papers from the CIA agency. After much discussion, Laipenicks allowed the journalists to make copies. The reporters learned that Laipenicks worked for the CIA “after the war as a spy in the anti-Soviet operations…”
Like Allen Dulles, the CIA in 1976 was still treating Laipenicks and many other known Nazis living comfortably in the United States as “good” or “minor” wartime criminals.
For Holtzman the INS was not doing enough to ferret out Nazis living here. She along with others in 1979 Congress—just 34 years after the end of the war– ordered the Justice Department to create the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) within the Criminal Division to handle the Nazi cases. Now, finally, we had our own Simon Wiesenthals’!
Jews and non-Jews in the OSI dedicated themselves to finding Nazis living amongst us. They prosecuted many of the 239 listed in the FBI’s files on Nazis in the United States. While many within the FBI wanted basic justice brought against Nazis war criminals, others did not. Some FBI agents falsified records of Nazis to protect them from being accused for “crimes against humanity.”
Over the next twenty to thirty years the OSI won many profile cases. The John Demjanjuk case, a high profile case, it lost. The OSI lost stature and manpower.
Demjanjuk (Ivan the Terrible) was arrested and accused of being an inhuman guard killing thousands at Treblinka. He was found guilty of lying on his immigration papers, eventually stripped of his citizen ship and sent to Israel to be tried as a war criminal. In the early 1980’s he was found guilty and sentenced to death. With the cold war thaw Israelis were allowed access to Soviet war documents that clearly showed that Ivan the Terrible had never been a guard at Treblinka. All the eyewitnesses in the United States were wrong in their identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. Eventually the Israeli justice system found Demjanjuk not guilty of the crimes for which he was tried. He was a free man and sent back to the United States.
The OSI was accused by the rabid anti-Semites in America like Pat Buchanan of being strongly influenced by Jewish groups. Buchanan, a White house advisor to President Ronald Reagan, splayed his vile tongue at what he called the “revenge obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He stingingly questioned the Justice Department if they didn’t they have better things to do than “running down seventy-year-old camp guards.”
Buchanan, like Hoover and Dulles before him, thought working with known Nazis (the so-called “good Nazis”) was not as important as fighting the Cold War.
In time, the OSI within the Justice Department “brought more than one hundred successful denaturalization and deportation cases against Americans with Nazi ties.” While it was justice too long delayed, it was not justice denied.
Recently (December 2014) a national commission reported the CIA misled the nation about the use torture on prisoners. Only ten or so years after the initial torturing took place-and some may be still taking place the CIA publically and blatantly denies the truth of this Commission. –
Decades after the war in 2010, “in a secret internal history of the government’s decades-long hunt for war criminals concluded that the United States became a refuge for the Nazis after World War II.”
In 2011, a German court convicted John Demjanjuk , at the age of ninety-one, of taking part in the killing of twenty-eight thousand prisoners as a guard Sobibor, not Treblinka.
The Nazis Next Door is a timely and fascinating book on a topic not often spoken about and quickly forgotten. Lichtblau’s book serves the purpose of revealing the fact that “justice delayed” may be “justice denied” for the victims of the Nazis’ atrocities.
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David Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. Your comments on this article may be placed in the box below or you may contact the author directly at david.strom@ sdjewishworld.com