neighborly monsters
by Douglas Messerli
Eric Lichtblau The Nazi Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)
Despite father’s and mother’s strong-minded commitments—of which I am
proud and which, I am sure helped to make me such a fervent spokesman against
anti-Semitic sentiments and behavior—my father was basically a naïve man, a
true innocent in many respects, even though as an educator he was seen as a
community leader. Like so many others of the period, he believed in what the
government and newspapers espousing government viewpoints said without
question.
When I was in Junior High School, for example, he strongly encouraged me
write an essay on that year’s declared topic, “Space, Man’s New Frontier,” and
helped me, if I remember correctly, on the research, making certain that I
properly expressed praise for the
“great” space architect, Dr. Werner von Braun, who, having worked on the German
rockets V-2 in World War II, had helped the U.S. create the Saturn-V. President
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, then director of the Central
Intelligence Agency had, after all, been instrumental in bringing van Braun and
several other German scientists, through Operation Paperclip, to the US after
the War, and continued to award and praise these individuals for decades after
for their service to the Cold War battles with Russia.
My father never suspected, I am certain, the truth: that Braun had had
knowledge of and was likely personally involved in activities in
Mittelbau-Dora, the German base and concentration camp where Polish, Russian,
and some French slave laborers were forced to create the rockets, while being
fed little and killed on a regular basis, only to be replaced with others. Many
were hung in the tunnels of the rocket camp itself, particularly if they were
seen as slacking off or challenging their torturous tasks.
I won that Junior High School speech contest, and am now quite
embarrassed by my own innocent praise of the former Nazi’s contributions. As
writer Eric Lichtblau makes clear in his new study, The Nazis Next Door, more than 10,000 Nazi’s—many of them brutal
murderers during the War—were permitted and in many cases even encouraged by
the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies to seek asylum after the War in the
US. By the time enough people began to realize these facts, von Braun had died;
while underlings in the Huntsville, Alabama space program such as Arthur
Rudolph, who was admittedly (and implacably) involved in the hellish
concentration camp activities, and the so-called “father of space medicine,”
and Dr.
There have now been several books of this sad series of episodes in
American history, including Richard Rashke’s 2013 book Useful Enemies and Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip. But what Pulitzer-Prize winning author
Lichtblau reveals is just how determined the spying agencies (with figures like
Dulles, Bush, and, obviously J. Edgar Hoover) and, under President Reagan, even
the office the President itself, through opinions voiced by Pat Buchanan and
others like him, were to help and avoid any prosecution of the Nazi monsters in
our midst.
Soobzokov continued to live in William Carlos Williams’ hometown of
Patterson, New Jersey until a radical Nazi hunter (perhaps related to the
Jewish Defense League) exploded a bomb on his front porch. That event, in
itself, caused further calls to halt what by that time had finally become an
organized government response, headed by Eli Rosenbaum and Tony DeVito, of the
Justice Department in hunting down the remaining Nazis.
While the organization was able to force the deportation of people such
as Rudolph, they also met with continued resistance by other governmental
agencies which refused to release records and actually worked with the accused
in staging cover-ups. The Justice Department, however, did themselves the most
harm by falsely accusing John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio auto worker of being
the brutal Treblink guard, Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk, it was later
discovered was, in fact, a much lesser guard at another camp, Sobibor, and died
in a nursing home still protesting his innocence.
As Litchblau ponders, early in his book how could it happen that as the Nazis fled, their victims were often “left to languish,” that although thousands of the worst criminals in history were able to obtain American citizenship, as many homeless and tortured Jews were barred from our borders? The elephant in the room, quite obviously, is the fact that many of our leaders were perfectly willing to sleep with the enemy, and were likely as equally anti-Semitic as the Germans the Allies had just defeated. It is so terribly painful as an American to recall, as Lichtblau does early in this book, that Bess Truman, wife of President Truman, “did not welcome Jews in her home, and that the President himself privately referred to Jews and “Kikes” and “Jew Boys,” that the lionized General George S. Patton, as he and his men were discovering in the Nazi death camps, held “Jews in utter contempt.” Writing Truman, “Old Blood and Guts,” laid bare his rabid anti-Semitism, complaining of how the “the Jews in one DP camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” “would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy ‘locusts.’”
We entered the synagogue (on
Yom Kippur) which was packed with
the greatest sticking mass of
humanity I have ever seen.”
Rounding up the Nazis was clearly a near impossible task in a country
where they had been so readily welcomed.
My father, had ever read of these facts, could never have believed them.
What had his actions of War-time service meant if they had had so little
effect? Fortunately, brave journalists such as Litchblau, Richard Rashke, Annie
Jacobsen, Howard Blum, and Chuck Allen before him continue to speak the truth
so that we might finally comprehend our complicity.
Just a few weeks before I wrote this review (May 31, 2015), Lichtblau
reported in The New York Times that
“The American government paid $20.2 million in Social Security benefits to more
than 130 United States residents linked to Nazi atrocities over the course of
more than a half-century, with some of the payments made as recently as this
year….” Finally, it appears, such payments have stopped and most of the Nazis
have passed away. Perhaps it should not surprise us, in hindsight, that
numerous American leaders had learned little in their countrymen’s struggle to
wipe out such racist hate, but certainly it continues to sicken and shock most
of us.
Los Angeles, June 17, 2015
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2015).
