Eric Lichtblau talking:
the story of a man in New Jersey. His name was Tom Soobzokov. He was a guy who had many bosses over the years. He worked for the FBI. He worked for the CIA. And before that, he worked for the Nazi SS. And that opening scene that you’re talking about takes place in the mid-1970s, when people at the Justice Department were starting to first become aware that there were ex-Nazis in the United States. And Soobzokov was one of the people who had come under investigation. He had been living in the United States for 20 years at that point. And he went back to his old handlers at the CIA, somewhat frantically, because the heat was really being put on him over his past and these accusations that he was in fact a Nazi, which he vehemently denied. And in the declassified documents that I looked at from the CIA, there’s memo after memo where the CIA is recounting these frantic phone calls and conversations with Soobzokov, where he’s saying, you know, “What am I going to do?” And the CIA is almost as frantically then meeting amongst themselves to say, “We’ve got a little problem on our hands here, and it’s going to get worse.”
CIA head, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his role in shaping this policy.
Dulles was one of the intelligence titans of the 1950s, one of the original cold warriors. And he was someone who believed that there were, quote-unquote, “moderate Nazis,” his words, who the U.S. could use to its advantage in the Cold War. And he actively recruited them himself and, in a number of cases, intervened on their behalf when they were facing accusations about their past, about their involvement in Nazi war crimes. And he and J. Edgar Hoover were really the two linchpins in this, in developing this strategy of recruiting ex-Nazis as cold warriors, as anti-Soviet assets who, they believe, could gather intelligence for the U.S.
Now, the irony is that a lot of these guys, a lot of these ex-Nazis used as spies by the CIA, by the FBI, really turned out to be bad spies. There are all sorts of files that I examined showing that they—not shockingly in hindsight, that the Nazis were found to be liars and cheats and embezzlers, and in a couple cases they were even found to be Soviet double agents. So, not only do they have the incredible baggage of being Nazis, but they were not even good spies.
Allen Dulles meeting with Nazi General Karl Wolff in Switzerland He was the number two man, right, for Himmler.
we brought over, under something called Program Paperclip, like 1,600 Nazi scientists. These were engineers, doctors, jet propulsion experts, things like that. The most famous among them was Wernher von Braun, who was one of the guiding hands in getting us to the moon in 1969. And officially, under the policies put in place by Truman and Eisenhower after the war, these were not supposed to be, “ardent Nazis,” whatever that may mean. But, you know, in fact, these were people who were directly involved in, for instance, running slave labor factories, where thousands and thousands of people died in making Hitler’s rockets. These were doctors who were involved in medical atrocities. They then found homes in the United States as American scientists. Many of them became U.S. citizens. Many of them became honored for their work in the United States.
As far as Allen Dulles, who you asked about, yeah, his role in having negotiations and conversations with Nazis began even before the war was over, believe it or not. A few months before the war [ended], there was a meeting that I talk about in the book where he met at a safe house in Zurich with Himmler’s ex-chief of staff, who was trying to save his own skin. He realized the war was about to be over in a few months, and he was understandably afraid of being charged in all sorts of war crimes. This was Himmler’s chief of staff. He was involved in setting up the train network that led millions of Jews and others to their deaths. And Dulles thought that this general, General Karl Wolff, could help end the war earlier. As it turned out, they ended the war maybe two weeks earlier in the region in Italy that Wolff controlled. But as part of these negotiations, they were sipping Scotch over a lovely fireside in Zurich. For months and months after the war, even for the first couple of years, Dulles really effectively protected General Wolff, Himmler’s ex-chief of staff, from war crimes charges. And Wolff went from being a chief defendant, one of the top Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, to being merely a witness, and served virtually no time in prison. In fact, even when he was nominally a prisoner as a POW, he was allowed to wear a gun. He went boating on the weekends in Austria. He led sort of a charmed life after the war, thanks to the help of Allen Dulles, who went on to become the first director of the CIA.
I had never heard of Chuck Allen when I started my research, but he became sort of a hero of mine as I was writing this book. He was a left-wing journalist in the early 1960s, writing for obscure Jewish publications, sometimes communist-leaning publications. And he started writing exhaustively in the early 1960s about the fact, which was really unknown at the time, that there were Nazis and Nazi collaborators living openly in the United States. He wrote in 1963 an exhaustive, 40-page piece for a magazine called Jewish Currents, which was affiliated with the Communist Party. And in it, he documented the role of, for instance, a bishop in Chicago and a State Department analyst who had clear ties to the Nazis in atrocities.
And he was not only ignored, as you say, sort of written off as some left-wing kook, but at the FBI, they started paying attention, to the point that J. Edgar Hoover ordered him to be wiretapped for a number of years. And you had FBI agents trailing him as he would try and gather evidence on Nazi atrocities by people inside the United States. So he was seen as a subversive, as a communist plant, and was either ignored or shunned or actually retaliated against for writing these things in the 1960s. And this was a time when really no one else noticed or cared that there were, at that point, hundreds, thousands of Nazis living openly in the United states.
while he may have been ignored by the public, he was being harassed by the FBI, at the same time that the FBI and the CIA were protecting these Nazis. Another amazing part of the story is how so many of those in the concentration camps afterwards, the Allies were running these concentration camps. and the Jews were there. And often, the Nazi POWs in these camps would be put in charge of them—by the United States.
that was probably the single most striking thing to me in my research. There were a lot of alarming things that I came across that I didn’t know when I started writing this book. But I think the most repugnant of all the repugnant things was the treatment of the survivors, not just Jews, but communists, gays, Roma and others who survived the Holocaust, but for months, and in some cases a couple of years, after the end of the war were still kept inside the concentration camps themselves, under—behind barbed wire, under armed guard, sometimes under the supervision of other Nazi POWs.
And it was—I learned it was General Patton, a war hero, “Old Blood and Guts,” they called him, who oversaw the camps. He was the supreme Allied commander after the war. And he—I looked at his journals. He was a virulent anti-Semite. And there was a scathing report to Truman by an emissary of Truman’s from the University of Pennsylvania, Earl Harrison, that compared the camps that the United States was running after the war to the Nazi concentration camps. Harrison wrote that the only difference is that we’re not exterminating the Jews, which, you know, think of that in hindsight.
It’s a remarkable saga and a fairly shameful period in postwar history. We sort of think of the concentration camps, you know, being liberated at Dachau, at Bergen-Belsen, at Auschwitz, by the U.S. and Britain and Russia. But liberation for the survivors who were left in the camps meant staying in those same camps, behind barb wire, under armed guard. And remarkably, sometimes they were supervised by the same Nazis who had lorded over them when the Germans were still in charge.
And there was a report to Truman from the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a guy named Earl Harrison, that compared the camps to the Nazi concentration camps, except that, Harrison wrote, the only difference is we’re not exterminating the Jews. And General Patton, who ran the camps as the supreme Allied commander for the United States after the war, was furious when he read Harrison’s findings to Truman. And he wrote in his own journal—and I looked at these. I found the remarks so troubling and so jarring, I thought maybe at first they were a forgery, but it turned out to be true. He wrote in his own journal that what Harrison doesn’t understand, he thinks that the displaced persons in the camps are human, and they’re not. The Jews, he wrote—this is General Patton speaking—are worse than human, they’re locusts, and they have no respect for human dignity. And he recounted taking General Eisenhower, soon to be President Eisenhower, on a tour of the displaced person camps, and he said that Eisenhower didn’t really understand how loathsome the displaced persons were, and he thinks that they have some human dignity, when really they don’t.
Patton, it turns out, was not only a virulent anti-Semite, but also held the Germans in a weird sort of place of respect. I also tell the story in the book about, in those displaced person camps, Patton went to the holding cells for the German POWs, the German scientists, and he sought out one in particular, General Walter Dornberger, who oversaw the production of Hitler’s V-2 rockets, which had been phenomenally successful and destructive in bombing London and Antwerp. And Patton brings him out of the cell and says, “Are you Dornberger? Are you the guy who ran the V-2 program?” And Dornberger said to him, “Jawohl, Herr General.” And Patton pulled out three cigars from his pocket and handed them to the Nazi general and said, “Well, congratulations. We couldn’t have done it.” And it sort of epitomized this attitude that he had towards the Nazis. He even defied an order from Eisenhower at one point, General Eisenhower, and maintained the Nazis as supervisors in the DP camps, because he saw them as the most competent group that the Allieds had. So, I think you need to understand how horrific the conditions were for the survivors to understand how it was that so many Nazis made it into the United States.
These rocket factories were basically torture chambers. These were places where 10,000 prisoners—not most of them Jews, but most of them POWs from France, Poland, Russia and elsewhere—were building on an assembly line—an assembly line of death, basically—hundreds of rockets each month for Hitler. And if they did not meet their quotas, if they did not work up to standards, if they were suspected of sabotaging the rockets, as some tried to do, they were hanged from a giant crane, and all the other prisoners would be gathered around to watch them. And those who weren’t intentionally killed, thousands of them died just from disease and malnutrition and exhaustion, kept in these horrible, horrible conditions literally inside a mountain in Nordhausen, where the factory was held.
So, this was the production facility that Dornberger and Wernher von Braun, who went on to become even more famous, ran. And there was a guy who—physically at the mountain factory, named Arthur Rudolph, who was the production head at the Mittelwerk Nordhausen plant, he came to the United States, along with Wernher von Braun and Dornberger and the others, and Rudolph became almost as famous, as one of the geniuses behind the Saturn space program. And their Nazi legacies were basically erased.
the CIA, especially, and other intelligence agencies really went to enormous lengths to conceal their ties to the Nazis. They had had all these relationships, beginning immediately after the war through the ’50s, the ’60, in some cases even the ’70s, with Nazi spies and informants and scientists. And they went to great lengths to cleanse the records of a lot of the Nazis who came to the United States, removing material that showed their links to Nazi atrocities. Now, I found cases even in the 1990s, believe it or not, where you had the CIA actively intervening in investigations. By the 1980s and 1990s, the Justice Department was going after a number of these guys, was trying to deport them, for their involvement in war crimes, belatedly, I think.
And the CIA—in the case of a Lithuanian security chief who was involved in the massacre of about 60,000 Jews, the CIA tried to kill that investigation in 1994 and ’95. And they told Congress, yes, this guy was a CIA spy for us, this former Nazi collaborator, but we knew nothing of his wartime activities, is what they said. And, in fact, in their own files, in their own postwar files, it showed that they knew that this Lithuanian was under—quote, “under the control of the Gestapo and was probably involved in the murder of Jews in Vilnius.” So, this was—again, this is not the 1950s we’re talking about; this is the 1990s, where people at the CIA were actively trying to conceal their ties.
And some of these documents, as you suggested, only became available beginning in the 1990s, the late 1990s, when Congress ordered the declassification of war crime files. The CIA really resisted that at first. It took years for the historians to get at the war crime files. But beginning in around 2003, 2004, a lot of these files became declassified, and they really painted a pretty troubling picture.
a Justice Department report was kept under wraps for about five years. It was written in the mid-2000s. And I first got onto this, and really what started the book was that I got a tip that there was this exhaustive internal report at the Justice Department that looked at the efforts to go after the Nazis, and the Justice Department was sitting on the report. They had refused to release this publicly for very mysterious reasons. And I was able to get a hold of it and did a story on that. And I think even before I finished writing the story, I thought, you know, the material was so rich and so troubling that I wanted to try and do a book on it, because it really—it exposed both the successes of prosecutors in later years in going after these guys, but also really the just perverse relationships that the government had with a lot of these guys going back to the 1950s and 1960s. And that was something that the Justice Department did not want out there publicly.
I think the anti-Semitism really did play a part in the immigration policies after the war, which had the dual effect of both keeping out Jews—I mean, there were documents that I looked at from Senate immigration lawyers who actively said they didn’t—they thought Jews were lazy and not hard-working enough and didn’t belong in America. And so, it was very difficult. Only a few thousand Jews got into the United States in the immediate aftermath of the war.
And you had something like 400,000 Eastern Europeans who, because of the, “immigration quotas,” were allowed in in those years from places like Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Ukraine. And many of those, probably the vast majority of those 400,000, were in fact legitimate war refugees. These were people who were victims of Nazi occupation and were about to be taken over by the Soviet Union and were exiles. They really were. But among those 400,000 were many, many, probably several thousand or more, Nazi collaborators, and they came in with the group as—disguised basically as refugees and POWs. I mean, these were people who ran, for instance, a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia. There was—the head of that camp lived on Long Island for about 30 years. There were people who were prison camp guards. There were people who were the heads of Nazi security forces all throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. And it was very easy for them to basically fade into the larger group of war refugees and become Americans.
— source democracynow.org
Eric Lichtblau, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. His new book is The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.