The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men

this program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UC TV programs so let's welcome Eric Lichtblau please welcome him well thank you very much to Richard and the Topman foundation for having me and I just want to point out while two of those three stories did involve Republicans there are a number of other stories that the Obama White House was equally offended by so we are we are an equal opportunity offender I don't want to make it seem as if we're just going after Republicans so I usually write about contemporary politics and national security matters in Washington this is a little bit far afield for me involving a historical matter but the way I got onto this was through the newspaper through the New York Times about four years ago now I got a tip from an old source of mine at the Justice Department who said that there was a secret government report involving the history of the Nazis in America both the the efforts of government officials to find and deport them beginning in the 1980s and before that the efforts of the government to use some of them as spies and scientists and have relationships with ex Nazis for whatever reason the government had been sitting on this report for years had refused to put it out and and this source was suggesting that there was an important piece of history that needed to be put on the public record and I should try and try and get a hold of this it almost sounded like a pentagon papers for Nazis the secret report now if any of you are in public relations or if you know any reporters here's a tip what one surefire way to get a reporter's attention is to tell him that there's a secret report that the government does not want you to see so that that's almost like waving a slab of meat in front of a hungry dog and watching the reporter jump at it so I was fair to say interested very quickly and I was determined to try and get a hold of this report and for a bit of luck and some phone calls I was able to get the report it ended up being a front-page story in The Times but it was the kind of story that even before I had finished writing it I think I that there was a whole nother layer of complexity to this story that you couldn't really do justice to in a 2,000 word newspaper piece the some of the details in this report it was about six or seven hundred pages were so fascinating a few that stuck in my mind like one a Justice Department prosecutor who was involved in trying to confirm that that Mengele dr. Mengele the doctor of death had really died in Bolivia in the 1980s and before the days of DNA support said that he kept a piece of scalp in his desk for several weeks trying to figure out what to do with it and what forensic tests could be done to confirm whether or not that really was Mengele who died in Bolivia or not and the details in the report about about Cold War politics and how that affected our the ease with which Nazis had come into the country this was in my view at least a shameful and really untold period in post-war post-war history there are a few books that came out of great quality in the 1980s on the issue of Nazis in America but there's a whole treasure trove of Declassified war crime files that have only become public in the last 15 years under orders of Congress and they provided me with a whole new pathway to to researching this and in my research there were many many things that both shocked and and repulsed me as a journalist as an American the ease with which thousands of Nazis were able to get into America after the war the use by the government the CIA the FBI other intelligence agencies of of Nazis as spies and scientists even knowing the the war crimes that they were involved with the fact that the cut of the country and the government were essentially indifferent to this for the better part of 25 years before around 1980 when we started investigating them but I think the the one thing that that shocked and repulsed me most had nothing to do with the Nazis themselves it had to do with the Holocaust survivors and that was that surprised me because it wasn't a group that I planned to really examine in my in my research it was a group that as as horrific as the plight of the survivors was seems separate from the question of how the Nazis got into America but as I did my research I began to realize that they were really flip sides of the same question because to understand how horribly easy it was for thousands of Nazis to get into America you first have to understand horribly difficult it was for thousands of survivors to get out of the concentration camps even after the Allies won the war in the spring of 1945 you know there's been a lot of talk the last few weeks with the 70th anniversary approaching of the discovery of Auschwitz about the liberation about search the Auschwitz the liberation of the camps and I sort of cringed at that word knowing what I now know because liberation was really sort of a mockery for the survivors who were kept in those same camps in the concentration camps for months and sometimes years before visas were available to the United States and to Israel so if you'll indulge me for a minute I'll read a bit from the first chapter of the book which is called liberation spring 1945 Ferren wall displaced persons camp outside Munich while the Nazis fled their victims were left to languish these were the lucky ones hundreds of thousands of Jews Catholics gays Jehovah's Witnesses communists Roma and other quote-unquote parasites enslaved in Nazi concentration camps who somehow had managed to survive Hitler's genocide or killing machine yet even after Germany's defeat the survivors remained in prison for months in the same camps where the Nazis had first put them to rot the names of their jailers had changed with the dark Nazi swastikas now replaced by the bright colored flags of the Allied victors flying above the camps but the barbed-wire fences and armed guards still encircled them they were in a post-war purgatory leave Libyan conditions that as a high-level emissary of President Truman would painfully have to acknowledge were little different from those imposed on them by the Nazis themselves Yakko Bieber a Jew who survived the Nazi purge in the Ukraine was among the masses confined in the American DP camp at Ferren Wald we felt like so much surplus junk Bieber would write of his confinement human garbage which the governments of the world wished would somehow go away now consider again after the Allied said won the war and were in charge of those displaced persons camps that you had Jews and thousands of other survivors living living with food rations so measly that you still had prisoners who were dying of starvation and Melnick and disease from the diseases that were rampant in the camps and you had a formal policy by the Allied commanders including General George S Patton who ran the displaced persons camps of not providing extra rations to the Jews above and beyond what Nazi POWs were getting because that would be seen as giving them preferential treatment and he rejected that idea the conditions were so horrible that you had a black market that ran rampant in many of the camps where foodstuffs and basic human living material were traded on the black market exchange and the Allied responded by quashing that black market you had violent raids were in fact survivors who had survived Hitler's killing machine were then killed in black America raids by the Allies after they tried to get get food to keep to sustain their their - to make it through the day and believe it or not you even had some prisoners who killed themselves because their plight was so horrible you see here a sign saying we demand to open the gates of Palestine like Yakko Bieber said people felt they had nowhere to go I I did a fellowship at the US Holocaust Museum for much' last year and there was another researcher there who was studying the music he it'sh music that the Holocaust survivors in those DP camps had sung mostly women and children with these these heartbreaking plaintive lyrics about how the gates of the world were closed and they had nowhere to go I mentioned that President Truman sent someone over to the camps to inspect them physically and to find out whether or not the complaints the Jewish groups were raising were really true or not could it possibly be the case that we had just won the war and yet yet tens of thousands of people were still living in horrific conditions months and months later so this is what earl harrison who was the dean of pennsylvania law school wrote after he inspected a number of those camps and even by the standards of washington reports which are often quite blistering and quite scathing this is about his blistering as i've ever seen he said as matters now stand we appear to be treating the jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them this was in late 1945 months to the Allied said one the war I mentioned General George S Patton a war hero old blood and guts was his nickname he's a legend in military circles in fact he's the subject of a of a quite fawning biography now by Bill O'Reilly and it's a best-seller remembered quite heroically and in the annals of modern history yet he was essentially responsible for in those early months the disdainful treatment of the prisoners under his watch of the displaced persons camps Truman passed on his report to Patton and demanded answers as to how this was allowed to happen now Patton rather than responding as as someone might to calls of such horrific nature was angry he wrote in a journal that he kept which I found a copy of at the US Holocaust Museum when I first read what Patton wrote in response to Earl Harrison's report I thought it might be a forgery it was difficult to imagine that a famous war General had written words that were so so baldly anti-semitic and hate-filled he yet this is what Patton wrote after that report came out quote Harrison and his ilk believed that the displaced person is a human being which he is not and this applies particularly to the Jews who were lower than animals laying bare the rabid anti-semitism that infected the American refugee effort Patton complained of how the Jews in 1dp camp with quote no sense of human relationships in quote would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy locusts he told of taking General Eisenhower to tour a makeshift synagogue that the Jews in one camp had set up to celebrate the holy day of Yom Kippur quote we entered the synagogue which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen this was Eisenhower's first glimpse of the DPS Patton wrote so it was all new to him quote of course I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged should be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act here you see Patton on the right with General Eisenhower later to be President Eisenhower in the middle giving one of those very tours of the Eisenhower eventually fired Patton because of his refusal to D not safai the camp's Patton was was outwardly defiant in using Nazis civilians to run the DP camps in lording over the Jews the Communists the gays the gypsies and others who lived in those camps and he told his man that if the Nazi civilians are the people best positioned to run these camps then he bet it they better damn well use them I also tell the story in the book of Patton's sort of odd fascination and admiration for those Nazi prisoners under his watch there was a barracks that were the scientists were kept who had built Hitler's famous v2 rockets that were used to bomb London and Antwerp and other parts of of Europe and we're really a technological marvel at the time that the Allied could not match and he and Patton walked over to the barracks and called out the top ranking scientists there a man by the name of general walter dornberger and he said are you dornberger and the general said yeah volvo general and Patton said you're the one who built the v2 s and he said again you have all her general and Patton pulled three cigars from his pocket and gave them to dornberger and he said well congratulations we couldn't have done it and in fact dornberger along with about 1,600 other scientists was brought to the United States under what was at first a secret program called Operation Paperclip to exploit their technological advantages that they brought to their rockets and to help the United States beat the Soviets to the moon in 1969 and yet at the same time Patton was openly disdainful of the prisoners under his watch and there were the the visas to the United States were practically non-existent in those early years there were a few thousand at most in the first two or three years after the war for German for survivors in the camps inside Germany and if you look at the Congressional Record the reasons are pretty clear that that law makers and policy makers believed that the survivors were people who were lazy and felt entitled and did not deserve American citizenship now stark contrast to visas for Eastern Europe and there were about 400,000 visas at that same time they were issued to people from Latvia Estonia Lithuania Ukraine and elsewhere and these are people who were seen again according to the Gresham erect as people of good stock as hard-working people and who people who not coincidentally were staunchly anti-communist at this point the USA's aims were clear in trying to ramp up for this new cold war that we were about to start after defeating the Nazis and refugees from Eastern Europe staunchly anti-communist refugees were welcomed with open arms in America now the vast majority of those 400,000 were no doubt legitimate war refugees in every sense of the word these are people who whose countries had just been occupied during the war by the Nazis by Hitler and who are about to be taken over by the Soviet empire for generations to come but it's also clear for my research and elsewhere that a not insignificant number of those four hundred four hundred thousand probably somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five thousand refugees who got into America were we're senior Nazi collaborators people were not victims in any way of the Nazi occupation but were willing participants in it and collaborators with Hitler and the Gestapo in carrying out the Holocaust these were people like Alexandra's Leykis you see here on the left in Lithuania in 1938 lil Akos was the head of a notorious secret security police in Lithuania and Vilnius in 1938 and was a top collaborator with the Gestapo in interrogating rounding up and imprisoning thousands and thousands of Jews in Vilnius malaika's was the man who would sign the arrest warrants for people like an eight year old girl named Nita Kaplan in Vilnius and thousands of others jail them in the city prison and then turn them over to the Gestapo where 60,000 Jews were taken usually marched about seven miles outside outside the city to a place called Panerai at a death camp and then machine gun to death in one of the war massacres in the Holocaust and yet malaika's was able to come to the United States and you see him here in his naturalization photo in 1976 with the help of the CIA Leykis like a number of the others who I write about in my book was a known Nazi collaborator who was hired by the CIA despite his past in the CIA files which have now been Declassified I mentioned that there's a huge treasure trove of information that's become public only in the last 15 years you can find Declassified war crime files from the CIA where they say that that lil Akos was a known collaborator with lucas topo and was probably involved in the massacres of large number of jews by the Nazis at Vilnius in the early 1940s and yet the CIA gave him a job as a spy in Europe after the war because he was seen as an asset in this bold new Cold War he was paid about $1,700 a month plus a carton of cigarettes for his trouble yet he and others like this man Otto von bullsh King who was also a CIA spy in Europe were not particularly good spies I think that's the perhaps one of the horrible ironies of this situation was that the United States was putting to use hundreds of spies around the world who had known ties to the Nazis in in Europe in the Middle East in Latin America in Australia even here in the United States and yet many of them were mediocre spies or worse it will probably surprise no one in this room that the Nazis we hired as spies for a salary cartons of cigarettes or liquor often turned out to be thieves cheats embezzlers liars and occasionally even Sylvia double agents these were the people we were using in the Cold War against the Soviets and overlooking their Nazi pasts I tell the story in the book of Otto von bullsh King who you see here who is assigned in Austria in the 1950s in 1954 on a spy mission to deliver a satchel full of spied on swith photos in the real names of other anti Soviet spies to a contact in Hamburg he got on a train with his satchel got off at the other end Hamburg only to realize that the satchel instead of containing these top-secret classified spy documents contains pajamas in men's toiletries because he had mixed them up with another man's bag now you or I if we had botched an assignment so badly and we also had the arguably a black mark of being atop a top Nazi in our in our recent past would likely have been fired yet von bullying not only continued his work with the CIA but the CIA relocated him and his family to New York him his wife and his teenage son and they did so they said as a quote-unquote Ward for his loyal service in Austria after the war and in view of this again as their word not mine the innocuousness of his work with the Nazis now innocuousness is a strange word to use when you consider that Otto von bullshitting was a top aide to this man who some of you may recognize this is Adolf Eichmann who was the architect of the final solution von Boldt ring was a top adviser in the sd's Jewish Affairs Office and he wrote these hideous white papers in the years before the war started for Eichmann here's a sampling of of something he wrote called in a paper that was called the Jewish problem yeah this is in 1938 I'm sorry 1937 before the start of massive extermination at a point when Ike men von bullshitting and other top Nazis were trying to terrorize the Jews into fleeing the country Vaughn bolstering wrote a largely anti-jewish atmosphere must be created among the people in order to form the basis for the continued attack and the effective exclusion of them the most effective means is the anger of the people leading to excesses in order to take away the sense of security from the Jews even though this is an illegal method it has had a long-standing effect the Jew has learned a lot through the programs of the past century and fears nothing as much as a hostile atmosphere which could go spontaneously against him at any time so this was the work that the CIA would declare in its own files was innocuous in their view as far as his own role with the Nazis and in fact Vaughn bullsh ring would be protected by the CIA for over 25 years in the United States you may remember that in 1960 Vaughn bullshitting his old boss Eichmann was captured by the Israelis in Argentina in in a famous raid that would lead to one of the great trials of the century in Israel and Eichmann's execution von Boldt Schwing was very worried according to the files that I looked at in the National Archives that the Israelis would come after him next so he went back to the CIA for help and in fact his old CIA handlers met with him in a restaurant in New York where they assured him that they would continue to protect him in the United States they would not tell the Israelis who he was or where he was they would not tell the Justice Department they would not tell the IaaS they would not tell the White House they would not tell anyone else there was only one caveat at that point non bullsh Fang was such a successful businessman in New York he worked in the export import business that he had been nominated for a job with the State Department in India on an export panel and the CIA was worried that if that nomination continued his past his past ties to Eichmann in his role with the CIA were bound to come out publicly so they said if you want our protection you have to give up that job now believe it or not Vaughn bullshitting at first protested he said you know I've earned that job I want it see I said you either give up that job or we out you he gave up the job and it was another 20 years before I'm sorry I thought a picture of him another 20 years before von Boldt ring was discovered by the Justice Department living in Sacramento on his deathbed there are many others like them just to just to look at a couple this is a man by the name of Walter Hilger you see him here in his Nazi uniform he was a top foreign affairs specialist on Sylvia d'affaires for Hitler he was with Hitler towards the end of the war in one of his bunkers and his immediate boss nazi general named Ribbentrop his ties to war crimes are so hideous that his boss was executed at Nuremberg not only wasn't Hilger executed but he was brought to the United States and lived in Washington for years as a covert analyst for the CIA he would give briefings at Langley on Sylvia d'affaires and he lived openly in Washington he was even listed in the white pages and he held academic cover with institutions like Harvard he was completely unremorseful he wrote his memoirs years later and he said that for anyone who thinks he has anything to apologize for he has no regrets these were the costs of war and it was years before anyone realized who he was or what he had done with the Nazis this is another man Arthur Rudolph one of the scientists that I mentioned the 1600 who came here under Operation Paperclip now this at first was a secret program when the United States within months of the end of the war began bringing dozens of rocketeers including Rudolph and his boss Verner von Braun and his boss general dornberger to the United States to military bases in Alabama and Texas Ohio here in in California and San Diego but the secret soon got out it was difficult the Pentagon would learn to hide the identities of dozens of elderly Germans with Vick German accents in Alabama and Texas and and word soon came out that this program was afoot now the Pentagon at that point in late 1945 early 1946 achieved what I think was a masterful public relations boy and that was to acknowledge this program had been created and to really embrace it with the idea that these Nazis were really Nazis in name only under the official program that was approved by President Truman and later by President Eisenhower you could not be a quote-unquote ardent Nazi under the program if you were art not so you would not be allowed in and the Pentagon quickly whitewashed the records of dozens of these scientists they hold photo ops they held press conferences when some of the German scientists in Texas would greet their wives coming over from from Germany with flowers at the train station they even put some of them on postage stamps and these were seen as American success stories who are going to beat the Soviets to the moon now what someone like Arthur Rudolph shows is that this was essentially a cover story a concoction you see our through Dolf here with his Nazi identification card if you look in the top left and the bottom right you can even see the Nazis stickers what not being an ardent Nazi meant for someone like Arthur Rudolph was that he ran the production factory in Germany during the war where tens of thousands of slave laborers built the v2 rockets for Arthur Rudolph and Verner von Braun and an estimated 10,000 would die there because of the conditions were so horrific disease was rampant malnutrition and starvation was everywhere and for those unluckiest among them who were suspected of sabotaging the rocket parts or perhaps not meeting their daily quotas they were brought to the center of the factory under a Neath a huge crane while all the other prisoners were gathered around and they were hanged this was a lesson to the other prisoners that they better not mess with the Nazis machinery now Rudolf was completely indifferent to the suffering and plight of those tens of thousands of slave laborers most of them by the way we're not Jews but were POWs from France Poland Russia and elsewhere he would claim years later that as far as he knew they were happy and content and they were well fed and no one seemed to have any problem problems there despite the dozens who were dying every day from disease and malnutrition and later on when he was confronted with his crimes he said well I did my job that was usually the line that that you would hear often from people like Rudolph and his boss Werner von Braun who did not operate out of the factory unlike Arthur Rudolph was the production manager but did visit it as many as 15 times and von Braun who became famous as as the father of the modern space program and was even here on Disney Sunday morning specials likewise said that you did what you did in the name of war and he had he made no apologies for using thousands of slave laborers to build those v2 rockets this is another doctor another Nazi scientists who came over under Operation Paperclip by the name of dr. who bare toes strughold he was one of about 40 doctors who were brought to Texas to an airbase there to work on the US efforts to keep astronauts and pilots alive in space what Verner von Braun to putting the Rockets in space dr. struggled was to keeping them keeping the pilots alive now what the Pentagon not say publicly about his record was that he basically plied his trade during the war during World War two on prisoners at Dachau under hideous conditions of human experimentation on both children and adults who see him here on the right we have a flight simulator that he set up in Texas this would be a place where VIPs like Lyndon Johnson or the Shah of Iran would go to sort of check out the bells and whistles and the gravitational experiments that strughold was doing he also had a flight simulator not unlike this in Dachau during the war at the concentration camp that was where they would put children and subject them to far greater levels of pressure and gravitational pull to the point that many of them died and he also would subject prisoners of Dachau to fatal doses of putrid seawater the idea there was to find ways of keeping German Nazi pilots alive when they crashed into the sea the Germans were having a problem with the pilots surviving the crash but then dying from overexposure to putrid seawater and dying of poisoning essentially and strughold and the doctors under him would would do experiments to see how much putrid seawater the body could safely sustain not surprisingly many of those patients died in the course of those experiments and struggled held a sort of clinical view of this he would take part in Nazi conferences that were organized by the SS during the war and would push for more human experiments - in order to gain better results for him it was all about the science and that was what would continue not only in Dachau but in the United States where he became known as the father of space medicine because his contribution to aviation was so so huge and believe it or not until just a few years ago there were still awards in his honor from space associations and some colleges and military bases in Texas now I don't want you to come away from this with the with the idea that this book is all villains there are few heroes and one of them is the man you see here on the left a journalist in the 1960s by the name of Chuck Allen I had never heard of Allen when I began my research but he soon became a hero of mine because I learned that he had written these exhaustive exposes for obscure publications that no one had ever heard of often communists leanin publications some small Jewish publications on the existence of Nazis in the United States he also held rallies to draw attention to the problem you see a poster for one on the right in 1963 in Brooklyn healed others here in LA in Los Angeles others in Chicago and he would try and reveal the fact to the public that you had people who had been identified as war criminals at Nuremberg now living in the United States freely with little investigation or scrutiny now not only did most of the country ignore ignore Chuck Allen but the FBI now know it went so far as to put a trail on him for years they J Edgar Hoover the the famous director of the FBI signed a warrant a secret warrant declaring him a communist subversive and a national security threat in the 1960s and he was wiretapped for years and FBI agents would trail him around New York and Washington and open his mail coming from Eastern Europe as he was trying to do his reporting to gather evidence on various Nazi figures like dr. Herbert has struggled and it would be another 20 years before the country as a whole would begin to recognize what truck Allen had been saying since the early 1960s that in fact there were many many Nazis dozens hundreds perhaps thousands living openly in the United States and no one was doing anything about it at in 1980 under pressure from Congress primarily Brooklyn congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman the Justice Department did finally belatedly open a whole new team of investigators historians and lawyers to go after and try and deport dozens and dozens of Nazis unfortunately by that point they were middle-aged or elderly the evidence was still legal problems were enormous and many of them would live out their lives in the United States it was a tragic case in my view of too little and too late and with that I think we will open it up to questions so let me remind you that this is being preserved for you CTV and we want to get your questions on the microphone so that they can be integrated into the final versions of this presentation that can be viewed later so let's start with the first questions but please come forward to the microphones on stage left stage right sure hello thank you so much it's well known that the State Department was fairly anti-semitic to what extent do you think they had a role in allowing this large number of people to immigrate to the US well the State Department actually was an opponent the only opponent that I found of the idea of bringing the scientists in the United States they they were sort of the the conscience of the government in opposing this plan was first secretly proposed and they thought that this would be a disaster if it ever came out publicly which which it eventually did there's one memo to the State Department to an officer who would raise these concerns in about 1946 late 1945 early 1946 and the response from the Pentagon was that the State Department needed to get out of the way because those scientists were coming and it was quote time to stop beating a dead Nazi so the State Department for all the anti-semitism that was cleared during the war and continued it in some parts of the of the agency in the department after the war in that case was was the one that took the ethical high ground and deserve some credit for that if you have questions maybe start lining up that way we can sort of keep things moving yes indicated that the spies seem to seem to be mediocre right so two questions one is the scientists actually do their job in terms of advancing whatever it is that America was trying to accomplish in terms of I guess the Cold War slash well that called orbits the moon and were the Nazis who were actually very effective spies yeah two questions did the Nazi scientists bring much of value essentially to the United States and were there any spies who were good at their jobs Minoo the Nazi scientists clearly brought a technological advantage to the United States putting the morality aside for the moment it's clear that they gave us a leg up on the Silvius and without them we might not have reached the moon in 1969 but but might have reached it several years later how much later I think is is unknown and unanswerable but it's also clear that this was part of a massive public relations I would argue sham by the Pentagon in disguising the scientists as people they were not because they realized that if their true role in war crimes became known that even that technical advantage they brought to the United States would not be tolerated that the United States did not have the stomach for using even gifted Nazi scientists who had been involved in forcing tens of thousands of slave laborers to their deaths and so that was was essentially covered up for years the second question about the Nazi spies were there any good ones yeah sure there were some that probably the the best among the lot was Nazi general by the name of Reinhard Gillan who was used by the military the US military and the CIA four years after the war he had a whole network of ex Nazi spies who were put to work in in Sylvia control controlled zones of Europe surveilling trade lines trying to try and delay intercept cables trying to to translate documents and and perform other tasks the US officials believe they didn't have the capability to do themselves and Gaylen with such a prized asset that the that the u.s. brought him to New York in 1951 they they brought him to Yankee Stadium and he watched the World Series game with Mickey Mantle and they rolled out the red carpet Gailen kind of held the u.s. in disdain he took millions of dollars for his spy work but he refused to say who was really working for him and what their Nazi pasts were and the United States didn't really press him and this was really a launching pad for him because he went on to be the first intelligences are of westrom in Germany after cutting ties with the United States in the 1960s so he he certainly brought intelligence benefits to the United States but for every Reinhard gellan there were two or three who brought nothing of value in my view yes hi can you talk about how this came to light and were there any consequences for the scientists or for the US government officials that had falsified the documents there was only one Nazi scientist who was ever prosecuted that was Arthur Rudolph who you see here in 1981 after this new initiative by the Justice Department to identify Nazis the Justice Department's new office went after Arthur Rudolph and under threat of deportation he voluntarily left the country and returned to Germany and lived out his life there but there was a significant backlash from the Reagan White House as I write about in the book and you had people like Pat Buchanan who was a fierce critic of the of what he called the hairy-chested Nazi hunters at the Justice Department who believed it was wrong for prosecutors to be going after men like Arthur Rudolph who had committed there the the latter half of their lives to us space efforts in fact Rudolph got pensions from the Nazis from NASA and from the US government so he was getting it from all sides and he was the first and last Nazi scientist ever prosecuted there about a and others under investigation in the 1980s according to the records that I that I was able to get ahold of none of them were ever prosecuted and the other cases simply fell by the wayside no one was ever held give I mean there's there's chocolate of evidence especially in the 1970s and 1980s that you had the CIA especially really actively obstructing investigations at the point when Justice Martin prosecutors would begin to go after Nazis who had ties to the CIA you had the CIA whitewashing their records denying the existence of documents in their own files lying to the I ns but no one was ever held accountable for any of that with regards to the space race to your knowledge did the USSR adopt similar tactics in adopting in a sense Nazi scientists and spies of their own for the same purpose yeah did the Soviets do the same thing basically was the question yes they did and and that was certainly a driving force in Operation Paperclip not only the Soviets but the but the French and the British who were our allies but we still wanted to leg up on them to where they were all trying to recruit as many of the Nazi scientists as they could to replicate the success of these v2 rockets the Silvius were throwing money at these people and there were reports even that they were they were kidnapping scientists so this was clearly seen as as a threat to the United States in this new Cold War and and was the main motivation for for bringing over hundreds of these scientists yes so you're talking about a lot of how there's a you know the rationale behind it is a validation somewhat of a validation of the Nazi war crimes what about in terms of spoils of war rationale that we won we get to take their their intelligence their whatnot did you find any evidence of anything like that or any other rationales yeah there was was certainly a feeling that that you know the the winners reap the spoils of war what was different about this was that in in past conflicts in World War one and other conflicts before this the United States and and victors had always interrogated the the scientists behind whatever you know whatever munitions and materiel they they were fond of they would have Terra Gate them they would seize their blueprints they would take the hardware usually on the battleground what was different here that had never really been done before was that we brought all these people back to the United States essentially to live as Americans and they were told early on you can stay here for as long as you like you will be treated as an American this isn't you know we're not going to just sort of grab your knowledge and send you home and and that was what set this apart in my view from from past spoils of war yes in Steven Kendra's book brothers he describes Allen Dulles his role and yes Nazis here and his brother of course was John Foster Dulles yes who was their secretary of state so did Foster Dulles know about Allen Dulles role in bringing knots a year and end the State Department object to that yeah I'm glad you asked about Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles is his brother I write a lot about allen also and and that gives me a chance to talk about him as well Allen Dulles was was a key figure in this exploitation of Nazis in the new Cold War and in fact a couple of early chapters are devoted to him there's a fascinating story that that I included in the book about Allen Dulles at the end of World War two as the top US intelligence official in Switzerland meeting with one of his counterparts a Nazi general by the name of Karl Wolfe even before the war was over Germany had not surrendered yet but everyone realized that Hitler was was going down to defeat it was just a question of when and Allen Dulles met with General Wolfe over a fireside in Zurich and they shared scotch and talked in German about mutual acquaintances now general Wolfe a top aide chief of staff to SS chief Himmler and in fact wolf was the man who set up the train network that took millions of people to their deaths in the concentration camp seen yet Dulles not only didn't confront him with his war crimes or or lay hands on him or put him in cuffs but instead often a sweetener for him to work with the Allies at the end of the war and afterwards and in fact for years Dulles protected him and other Nazi generals from prosecution and saw them as people who could help the United States in this in this new Cold War and that there passed war crimes were really irrelevant to him as far as John Foster Dulles he his record does not his name does not show up much in the record I he and his brother were both involved before the war in representing German industrialists with ties to the Nazi Party but after John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State I would certainly not be surprised if if he was you know well-versed on this with with his brother Alan Alan went on to become the CIA director in the 1950s under the first CIA director under Eisenhower but I haven't found specific documentation of that on the record did the Mossad go after any of these guys and did it have any impact on the us-israel relationship yeah you know it really had sort of a weird role in all this I talked about the capture of of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 by the Israelis and that which really freaked out otto von bolts ring it was living in New York at the time but Israel did not want back some of the Nazis who were caught in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s they felt that Eichmann had been in such a signature moment as someone of such a high level they didn't want sort of the lower level if you were just a concentration camp guard or a mid-level SS officer the Israelis really weren't interested in them as surprising as that may seem and the only time that they later agreed to accept someone back under some pressure from the United States was in the case a famous case in Ohio of John Demjanjuk an Ohio auto worker who was originally thought to be an infamous guard at Treblinka ivan the terrible' not just not just any guard but someone of sort of monstrous barbed barbarism who did all sorts of horrific things and seemed to almost revel in torture and the Israelis did accept him back because they thought that this was this was a Nazi of some prominence but that case ended disastrously because the Israelis came to conclude that he was not in fact Ivan the Terrible he was he was a guard at a different camp at Sobibor but he was not the notorious Ivan the Terrible and they freed him from death bro and send him back to the United States so that had a real chilling effect for years on Israeli US relations when it came to Nazis in the u.s. this is more contemporary but in the fall of this of 2014 Congress passed this law denying Social Security benefits but all the living Nazis I don't know how many there really was it your book that may have precipitated this or and how are they tracking down these Nazis yeah IIIi talked about that in my book and there was also a story that The Associated Press did about the fact that that you had it's really a small number a handful of Nazis living overseas who left the country voluntarily and so we're collecting Social Security it was sort of an easy political moment for Congress which doesn't do much anymore to say we're actually going to do something we're in denial security benefits to Nazis because you know who would oppose that yeah yeah it was really a small number and it was in for instance the case of Arthur Rudolph we talked about here I mean he was someone who left the United States voluntarily so until his death continued to collect Social Security along with his Nassau pension and and other unit because he was never convicted of a crime so it's it's a bit of a loophole in the law that allowed that to happen yes you know if China tried to recruit Nazi scientists as well because I know they also fought in World War two I'm not aware of it's not say it didn't happen but I'm not aware of any active recruitment by China know what role that American Nazi sympathizers play such as Charles Lindbergh Joseph Kennedy in supporting or lobbying for these programs that's a good question I didn't find any evidence that sort of notorious anti-semites like Lindbergh or or Kennedy or Henry Ford even like that were behind any this program for supporting it I think that that a number of those people were sort of chagrined and shamed after the war you know for their support for or seeming support for the Nazis before the war and so kept a lower profile but at the same time I don't think their support was really needed because you had top US officials like Allen Dulles and and J Edgar Hoover at the FBI and others who were you know so firmly believing that that these people could help the United States in national security interests behind Patton's anti-semitism boy I don't know what was behind it the patents anti-semitism by you know I wish I could tell you I I don't know thank you yes this kind of relates to the previous question but I'm oh you give specific examples of scientists and high-ranking Nazi officials but I was wondering if the actual documentation is the the wording has justification in like an anti-communist sentiment because the Nazis were obviously staunchly anti-communist and at this time our government was very concerned with that so is the justification more of an anti-communist oh sure the anti-communist sentiment was certainly a big part of it especially when it came to the Nazi spies the belief was that that no one hated the Soviets more than the Nazis they had been fighting them for years they loathed them and that the United States needed to to put that that knowledge and hatred of the Soviets to use with people like otto von bolt Fang and Alexander LA Lakers even though the government was was aware of their complicity with war crimes so no the anti-communism was was at the heart of the use of the spies and I'd say to a lesser extent the scientists I mean that we wanted the scientists first of all to help to help us and send me into the moon and second of all to beat the Soviets so certainly anti-communist sentiment was behind that as well thank you my comment a reference to Simon Wiesenthal his efforts here yeah you know Simon Wiesenthal was that question was about Simon Wiesenthal efforts you know he was focused mostly on on Europe and Latin America that's where a lot of his his highest profile gets I guess were and I think he probably believed wrongly that there were not many Nazis and Nazi collaborators who made it into the United States so didn't focus a lot of attention here unlike the journalists who I talked about Chuck Allen who who believed in fact there were there were many Nazis in America and believed that quite rightly one interesting case that I do talk about with Wiesenthal in the book was a tip that he got in the night early 1960s in in Tel Aviv he was at a cafe and he was approached by three Holocaust survivors three women who knew of his reputation at that point and asked him about a woman who was a notorious guard at maje donek and they wanted to know whatever happened her she was sort of the female equivalent of Ivan the Terrible who was known for doing hideous things too and that conversation led Wiesenthal to try and track this woman down her name was Hermione Brown Steiner right and Ryan and he realized that she had managed to get into the United States and he forwarded that tip to I'm happy to say in my own newspaper the New York Times and a reporter was sent out in 1963 to knock on her door and she tearfully acknowledged everything but gave the usual you know what was I supposed to do justification thank you we have time for two more questions when I have professor Mark Kooza and our colleague here so go ahead with your question first I'm sitting here really shocked by the first part of your delivery you know I was born two weeks before Pearl Harbor and have carried this image of American soldiers liberating concentration camps and you know I was contrasted that with what's happened in some of our other Wars like Vietnam and and to find out that we kept you know the survivors in the concentration camps under starvation conditions and a lot of people continued to die is just appalling to me I wish you would address more how you know this image of ourselves as the liberators has you know seemed to be perpetuated maybe I'm the only naive one but I'm a PhD psychologist so it's not like I'm oblivious to the world yeah I mean I think we we sort of the policymaker sir convinced themselves that that conditions did improve from the truly horrific ones months after the war under Patton you know Patton remembered I'd not that long afterwards he was killed in this car accident which is what Bill O'Reilly now writes in his best-selling book about so conditions did improve people were not we're not starving to death on a daily basis but the fact is that they remained you know be harmed barbed wire under armed guard for you know often another four years so you know maybe the conditions weren't just unthinkably abysmal but they were still prisoners for a long time after that and you how that contrasts with the public image of you know the liberation of the camps is is striking and Macau was a shocking to me as anything in my research because I and I think probably people least of my generation you know know nothing about that it's sort of been forgotten to history even though you know some of the things that I that I spoke about like that report from the Pennsylvania Dean you know that actually got some headlines at the time I I was a little bit surprised that there were headlines saying you know Truman aide says camps are run like Nazis ran them and that's just been forgotten to history thank you yeah at the beginning of your remarks you told us about this a rumor at least of a secret report right that the State Department had read I presume there was no such rebar that you never saw that report no there was no no that that was report the led to the story and the Times a front-page story that I talked about yes so that was a justify report there was 600 plus pages about the the history of Nazi hunting efforts and that's what talked about you know Mengele scalp and all that was in that report can you tell a little bit more about what initiated that what change of public sentiment and when that was that the the report got commissioned and yeah the court was this was a report prepared internally by the Justice Department it was started in around 1999 and it took about seven or eight years to finish and the thinking and commissioning it was that that the Nazi hunting office within the Justice Department which created around 1980 was an important part of the Justice Department's legacy and something a lot of people knew nothing about and that this story should be told in some formal formal mechanism the irony was that the the just affirm itself then quashed the report and killed it and that that's how I heard about it was that the Justice apartment this out I think partly because this was not an altogether rosy view of the government's relationship with with Nazis there were a lot of a lot of missteps there obviously actions taken by the CIA to help Nazis you know this was not the the glowing view of oh hey we're finding and deporting Nazis and you know the government simply killed the report then that's what that's what essentially led to this book I want to make a comment I think that's very telling about this story you've told us Eric is usually people get out and get up and leave before the questions but no one left this is I think a tremendous compliment to you and to the importance and significance of this story that you've told so on behalf of all of us before you do your book signing I'd like to thank you for coming to Santa Barbara and sharing this story this hideous story in some respects with us thank you very very much you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 31,501

Rating: 4.4786153 out of 5

Keywords: Nazis, WWII, Eric Lichtblau

Id: eP3srgksUqU

Length: 57min 23sec (3443 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2015