The above video is from when the war actually began this year.
America’s Neo-Nazi bedfellows in Ukraine are latest in long line of odious allies Washington has used against Russia
From pogrom-mongers to Hitlerites to radical Islamists, the US has collaborated with repugnant partners for more than a century
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was furious when he found out in March 1945 that his supposed World War II ally, Washington, was negotiating with the German Nazis behind his back. In fact, by the accounts of some historians, American spy and future CIA director Allen Dulles essentially kicked off the Cold War when he held secret talks with Waffen SS General Karl Wolff as Hitler's regime was nearing its collapse.
Stalin, US President Franklin Roosevelt, and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill had agreed that they would accept only unconditional surrender from the Nazis because of the Hitler regime’s monstrous crimes. When the Dulles-Wolff talks came to light, FDR repeatedly and falsely told Stalin that no one was negotiating with the Germans. The Georgian generalissimo was unconvinced and suspected that his Western allies were maneuvering to contain the USSR and occupy territory that might otherwise fall to the Red Army.
The Soviets had reason to be suspicious. Some in Washington, including Dulles, viewed the USSR as America’s biggest long-term threat even as the countries worked together to defeat Germany.
Save the Nazis
As confirmed by documents that were finally declassified more than half a century later, US intelligence agencies were soon to hire upward of 1,000 Nazis as Cold War spies.By then, America already had a history of finding common cause against Moscow with unseemly allies. As the Soviets remembered well, the US had invaded Russia in 1918 in a failed effort to help overthrow the Bolshevik government. At the time, Washington was allied with White Army counter-revolutionaries, some of whom had a nasty taste for pogroms and other murderous atrocities.
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Even as then-President Woodrow Wilson moralized to world leaders about self-determination and opposing external aggression – principles that would be applied only according to US self-interest in the generations ahead – he sent American forces to intervene in the Russian Civil War. He was to set a precedent that has continued to play out to this day, from Germany to Central Asia to the current Ukraine crisis. The pattern was clear: Portray America as the virtuous champion of freedom while working with anyone — however abhorrent their deeds and views might be — as long as they share Washington’s burning desire to hurt Russia.
In 1945, Dulles got his way with Wolff, formerly Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man. The general and his group of SS officers, which was called the Black Order, agreed to surrender northern Italy to Allied forces. The deal didn’t avail much for the US, coming just six days before the full German surrender, and it sowed seeds of distrust with the Soviets and other allies.
For his part, Wolff was spared the gallows, as the Nuremberg prosecutors mysteriously took him off their list of major war criminals and treated him as a “witness” to Nazi atrocities, rather than a perpetrator, according to historians. Dulles went so far as to send a rescue team to save Wolff when the general’s villa was surrounded by Italian partisans.
US intelligence agencies, the Pentagon and the FBI helped whitewash the records of the Nazis they wanted to employ after the war. In other cases, notorious war criminals were hidden from America’s allies. One such useful rogue was Klaus Barbie, who was known as the “Butcher of Lyon” when he was torturing Jews and resistance fighters as a Gestapo officer in Vichy France. He worked as a spy in occupied Germany for the US, and after the French demanded that he be extradited to stand trial as a war criminal, Washington whisked him away to Bolivia in 1951.
As a US investigation finally revealed in 1983, the Americans had lied to their French allies about Barbie’s whereabouts. The US Army paid to have Barbie and other anti-communist agents evacuated from Europe through a “rat line” operated by fascist Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganovic. “Officers of the US government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and arranging his escape from the law,” US investigator Allan Ryan Jr. said.
In addition to directly employing many Nazis, the CIA reportedly paid millions of dollars to tap a large spy network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who was formerly Hitler’s chief intelligence officer on the Eastern Front. The German general was granted immunity from prosecution for his alleged war crimes and helped some of his Nazi cohorts flee Europe to avoid arrest.
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The US government employed Nazis for more than just spying. Over 1,600, including scientists and engineers, were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip to help win the Cold War with their technical skills. For instance, the Pentagon brought rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to America along with his new wife, his parents, and his brother. Von Braun, whose team in Germany used slave labor to build V-2 rockets for Hitler, became a hero of the US space program and was the subject of a Disney movie and a Time magazine cover story.
Not all of the Nazi transplants fared so well. Dr. Konrad Schafer, who was brought to a Texas military base because of his experience in aviation medicine, was sent back to Germany because US military officials were unimpressed by his work. As author Eric Lichtblau wrote in his 2014 book ‘The Nazis Next Door’, the Americans were willing to overlook claims by Nuremberg prosecutors that Schafer had links to medical atrocities, but they couldn’t tolerate his lack of “scientific acumen.”
US vs. Jews
Nazis also found post-war work running some of the very same camps where Jews had been slaughtered under the Third Reich. US Army General George Patton was put in charge of the displaced person (DP) camps in American-occupied areas, such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, where Jewish survivors were forcibly kept for weeks or months after their “liberation.”Some of the same guards who oversaw Hitler’s death camps and the same Nazi doctors who committed medical atrocities staffed DP facilities. Jews were still wearing their striped uniforms and being fed meager rations in the camps. When they turned to black-market dealing to obtain more food, German police were sent in to crack down at DP facilities in Stuttgart and Landsberg. Earl Harrison, an investigator sent by then-President Harry Truman, found that
Patton was “incensed” by the critical report, Lichtblau told NPR in a November 2014 interview. “Harrison and his ilk believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not,” the US war hero wrote in his diary. “And this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”
Like the Operation Paperclip scientists, many of the CIA’s Nazi spies were moved to the US. These newly minted Americans included the likes of Tscherim Soobzokov, a Circassian from Russia’s Krasnodar area who was nicknamed the Fuhrer of the North Caucasus, and Otto von Bolschwing, a top aide to Adolf Eichmann, who helped craft Nazi policy on dealing with Germany’s “Jewish problem.” Lichtblau quoted a CIA officer as writing, “We will pick up any man who will help us defeat the Soviets – any man, no matter what his Nazi record was.”
Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Nikolay Lebed, who had alleged links to the mass murders of Jews and Poles during the war, was brought to America in 1949. His background was no mystery. The US Army reportedly called him a “well known sadist,” and the CIA codenamed him “Devil.” But he was seen as too valuable as an anti-Soviet operative, so the CIA blocked his deportation when US immigration authorities decided to investigate a few years later. Lebed lived on under US protection, dying at the age of 89 in Pittsburgh.
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Useful and not so enemies
The FBI, under director J. Edgar Hoover, also relied on a network of Nazi spies and informants and helped protect them from prosecution and deportation. Laszlo Agh admitted to an FBI agent about his involvement in Hungary’s Arrow Cross, a fascist group that murdered thousands of Jews and helped deport thousands of others. Agh allegedly tortured many of his victims, forcing some to eat their own feces or jump onto partially buried bayonets. Nevertheless, historians say, Hoover recruited Agh as an anti-communist informant, and when immigration officials finally got around to trying to prosecute and deport the Nazi collaborator for visa fraud, the FBI chief forbid his agent from testifying about what the Hungarian had confessed.“In choosing to take the low moral ground, Hoover and the FBI betrayed the trust of Americans, living and dead,” wrote historian Richard Rashke, author of ‘Useful Enemies’. The agency’s “conspiracy of silence” in protecting war criminals made Americans “unwitting hypocrites in the eyes of the world,” he added. “How then must Americans judge the cadre of unelected, powerful men who welcomed some of those same murderers to America and helped them escape punishment in the name of national security?”
Hoover also defended Viorel Trifa, who helped lead Romania’s fascist Iron Guard and later became bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America. He became so politically connected that he once led prayers in Congress and met personally with then-Vice President Richard Nixon. Back in Romania, Trifa was sentenced to death in absentia for alleged war crimes. Hoover, who considered Trifa a “very desirable part of the landscape during the Cold War,” persuaded Nixon to cancel a meeting with one of the bishop’s accusers in 1955.
America’s Nazi migrants largely flew under the radar of public exposure until the 1970s, when activists began seeking to hold them accountable. In 1979, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) formed a new unit to investigate and prosecute hidden war criminals for deportation. However, the arms of the federal government that had been doing business with Hitler’s acolytes proved to be a hindrance to the DOJ initiative.
When Soobzokov was indicted for visa fraud in 1979, based on allegations that he had lied about his record as a Waffen SS officer, the CIA suddenly found a copy of a document showing that the Fuhrer of the North Caucasus had disclosed his Nazi past. It turns out that the spy agency had fired Soobzokov not due to his alleged wartime atrocities, but because he hadn’t been honest enough with his handlers. The agency did get him to admit to leading a death squad and executing a troublemaker, but his interviewer believed the Circassian spy was still holding back much of his story.
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Author Howard Blum wrote that Soobzokov was a lieutenant in a mobile killing unit that participated in the murders of a staggering 1.4 million Jews on the Eastern Front. But the former SS officer publicly denied any involvement with the Nazis and sued Blum and his publisher, owned by the New York Times, for libel. With witnesses wavering in the wake of Soobzokov’s CIA-aided escape from prosecution – and the author’s documentary evidence being challenged as “Russian disinformation” – the Times chose to pay a $500,000 settlement. The truth only came to light in 2006, more than two decades after Soobzokov’s death, when the CIA declassified 27,000 pages of documents relating to war crimes.
Not all of America’s imported Nazis were brought in by the government. Many snuck in as refugees through a lax immigration system, including some with SS tattoos on their arms. US Representative Elizabeth Holtzman condemned immigration officials for “appalling laxity and superficiality” in trying to root out war criminals.
For example, Andrija Artukovic, a high official in Croatia’s fascist Ustasha government during the war, adopted a fake identity and entered the US on a tourist visa in 1948. Artukovic simply overstayed his visa and worked at a California company owned by his brother. Yugoslavia requested his extradition on war crimes charges in 1951, and US officials stalled for seven years before refusing to send back the illegal alien. By the time he was finally extradited on a new request in 1986, he was 86 years old, so even after he was convicted of mass killings and sentenced to death in Yugoslavia, he was allowed to die of natural causes.
Ukrainian-born Nazi collaborator Jakob Reimer worked as a senior SS guard at a concentration camp in Trawniki, Poland, and allegedly took part in ghetto liquidations. He obtained a US visa in 1952 and managed to avoid a deportation order until 2005, but he died, at age 76, before he could be removed from the US. When confronted in court over his wartime conduct, he reportedly said, “It is all forgotten. It is all over.”
