Nazi War Criminals came to the U.S. after WWII

(This is to support Valtin’s action calls)

Professor McCoy Exposes the History of CIA Interrogation

My grandfather is an Iwa Jima war veteran, and one afternoon early last fall I recorded his story at the veteran’s reunion in Texas. He rarely talked about it, although I had seen the Japanese sword he removed from a soldier. “They told us not to do that; there could’ve been (wire) triggers,” he once said. I had always wanted to ask him about why he thought he fought the war, imaging him heroically fighting to end the Holocaust. I had made a childish, yet understandable assumption.

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

A drive to Texas, a check into the hotel room, and little sleep found me having the conversation I’d waited to have with him for years. After meeting him in the lobby area and turning my tape recorder on I asked him several questions; then, I asked him a big question for me, “Were you aware of Hitler and the Holocaust?” “Not really,” he said. I was surprised. He continued, “We were aware of what Hitler was doing, but we fought the Japanese after they attacked Pearl Harbor.” Thus, he was aware of the Holocaust, but that wasn’t the main reason he fought, if at all. That makes sense since he fought at Iwa Jima, but my illusion was shattered. I had another illusion shattered months before I asked him that question.
 

The U.S. being free of the influence of Nazi concepts and ideas after WWII is a falsehood; consequently, what shattered that illusion for me was learning that Nazi war Criminals came to the U.S. after WWII. Excuse me for saying this again, but –

Nazi war criminals came to the U.S. after WWII. The Nazi war criminal’s leader, Hitler, had found the manner in which the Church fiercely clung to its dogma and exterminated innocent people for the sake of power inspiring. In addition to feeling inspired by how the church exterminated “infidels” and “heretics” while they rigorously clung to their dogmatic, fundamentalist, and theocratic doctrine; his own plans for ethnic cleansing were reflected by the dark mirror of the U.S. extermination policy against all indigenous people.

excerpts from the book, American Holocaust by David Stannard  Oxford University Press, 1992
… despite an often expressed contempt for Christianity, in Mein Kampf Hitler had written that his plan for a triumphant Nazism was modeled on the Catholic Church’s traditional “tenacious adherence to dogma” and its “fanatical intolerance,” particularly in the Church’s past when, as Arno J. Mayer has noted, Hitler observed approvingly that in “building ‘its own altar,’ Christianity had not hesitated to ‘destroy the altars of the heathen.’ ‘, 15 Had Hitler required supporting evidence for this contention he would have needed to look no further than the Puritans’ godly justifications for exterminating New England’s Indians in the seventeenth century or, before that, the sanctimonious Spanish legitimation of genocide, as ordained by Christian Truth, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Meso- and South America. (It is worth noting also that the Fuhrer from time to time expressed admiration for the “efficiency” of the American genocide campaign against the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his own plans and programs.)

The Nazi War Criminals who migrated to the U.S. after WWII had been loyal to Hitler by necessity.

Source

“After World War II, countries that were generous in accepting immigrants from war-torn Europe; countries like the United States, Australia, Canada and England, which collectively took in hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, also took in thousands and thousands of people who were implicated in the Shoah and other Nazi crimes. We know that at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of them came to the United States.”
 

“The morality of the Cold War- anything goes,” states Bill Moyers
“Anything goes” meant allowing Adolf Eichmann, a “fugitive Holocaust overseer” to remain at large in 1958.

Documents Shed Light on C.I.A.’s Use of Ex-Nazis
WASHINGTON, June 6 – The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents that shed new light on the spy agency’s use of former Nazis as informers after World War II.

  “Anything goes” also meant having a twisted working relationship between the CIA and General Reinhard Gehlen. He, as German intelligence chief during WWII, hired known Nazi war criminals.

Source
Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 – Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA’s secret documentary history of the U.S government’s relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen’s group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a “double edged sword” that “boosted the Warsaw Pact’s propaganda efforts” and “suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB.” [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]

Elizabeth Holtzman, a congresswoman from New York and a true hero, did what the United States government would not do, or chose deliberately not to do. I don’t know which, maybe a little of both.

Source
“In fact they almost had gotten away with it but for one courageous lady named Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a congresswoman from the state of New York and who received allegations that Nazi criminals had actually come to the United States and that the United States government was doing nothing about it. Hearings were held in our Congress in 1977 and ’78. The result of those hearings was the enactment of a law now known as the Holtzman Amendment that rendered individuals who took part in Nazi crimes against humanity under the Nuremberg charter excludable from the United States.”

  To conclude, I heard a Holocaust survivor speak before having the conversation with my grandfather, which added great intensity to the anticipation I felt before asking my grandfather about his experiences during WWII. I wrote a little about the Holocaust survivor’s speech that moved my soul to tears.

“They came for the teachers first,” he said.
My mind blacked out as I saw the utility of that perverse logic.

He said that it began with bullying; first with forcing Jews to clean the streets with toothbrushes, and when it wasn’t “clean enough,” they stripped the Jews and beat them. He also talked about how all the Jews were given arm bands with the Star of David on them to identify them as Jews, so that among  many other horrendous things,  a curfew could be enforced.

They had to work for free from 7 till 7, and that being out after 7:00 P.M.  was punishable by death. He made that point before he talked about how his father courted his mother – breaking the curfew. His father literally risked his life to court his mother.

His father learned they were exterminating the Jews by following the Nazis from a safe distance to the suspected location after hearing some rumors about it; he’d spoken about the strong sense of community among the Jewish people. His father witnessed some of his Jewish friends and neighbors being stripped, being shot, and being put in a hole in the ground. He said his father couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Seems he also said that because the Nazis ran out of “room” to bury bodies, that bought him and his family some time.
I can’t remember how they protected him (the speaker as a child), seems they made a room for him. It’s coming back to me now.

His father took one brick a day from where he was forced to labor and hid the brick in his pants or coat some way, risking his life. He built a wall with those bricks to hide his family behind for the day when the knock on the door would  come early in the morning at 4 A.M., I believe he said. The speaker’s parents left him with a relative or a neighbor where he’d be safe at some point.

Memory fails, but the last thing I recall is the Holocaust survivor who spoke watched his parents be taken away in a railcar. I cried.

The Holocaust survivor’s story was fresh in my mind as I listened to my grandfather tell his story about his WWII experiences, and I couldn’t help but contemplate some things that have occurred recently; however, I kept silent about all those things running through my mind as he spoke and I listened.

I did not tell my grandfather about torture, secret prisons, immigration detention centers, or that the president has ordered people to be tortured. I didn’t want to break his heart. He may not be privy to all those things, but he has a healthy dose of good old-fashioned common sense. When I asked him if he liked our president, he looked at me like I’d just asked the dumbest question in the world. He turned his head to the side and laughed while saying, “You gotta be kidding me.” I left it at that.