How Will America Blame Russia Now?

Igor Chebykin (Russia)

The United States has revealed a widely known secret: the military, political and scientific leaders of Fascist Germany who avoided Soviet (or Allied) bullets and the Nuremberg hangman’s rope found a safe haven and good work in America after the war. The New York Times recently published the full text of a special report by the US Department of Justice confirming that Washington protected Nazi criminals hiding on US soil for many years.

The report was drafted four years ago, in 2006; however, the US Justice Department had resisted releasing it, saying it was incomplete. We can assume that simple unwillingness on the part of the current US authorities to divulge scandalous facts was behind that evasive wording. We cannot know how long they would have continued to harp on its “unfinished” nature had it not been for the insistence of the journalists at the New York Times. The very title of the newspaper article accompanying publication of the report is eloquent—“Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says.”

The 600 page document catalogs the results of work done by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to find and deport Nazi criminals and their accomplices. Paradoxically, it was necessary to deport many members of America’s military and political elite who had administered the country for several years after the war because they were also accomplices of the former Nazis. We are led to that inescapable conclusion by information in the report, especially regarding more than two dozen occurrences of cooperation between US agencies (including the CIA) and figures of the Third Reich.

In full awareness of their pasts, the CIA used them to fight Communist influence without a trace of embarrassment. That is, they were used primarily against the Soviet Union, America’s ally in the war with Nazi Germany. The report particularly mentions such “fighters” as Otto von Bolschwing, Deputy Obersturmbahnführer of Adolf Eichman’s, who was responsible in the Third Reich for the “final solution of the Jewish problem,” and the Nazi engineer Arthur Rudolph, who ran the Mittelwork Munitions Factory, where prisoners of war worked. In the United States, Rudolph received an award from NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) for his work on development of the Saturn V rocket, which is considered the brainchild of another German designer— SS Sturmbahnführer Werner von Braun, who developed the V-2 for the Third Reich and became the “father” of the American space program.

The Justice Department report also talks about American attempts to get on the trail of the Auschwitz monster Josef Mengele. It turns out Mengele’s scalp was kept for a long time in a Justice Department desk. It was later learned that “Doctor Death,” as Mengele was called, died in Brazil in 1979.

The Latvian press focused readers’ attention on former Latvian Political Police investigator Edgars Laipenieks, who not only collaborated with the Nazis during the war but worked for them. After dealing with the “Jewish problem” in Latvia, the police turned to finding Latvians suspected of collaborating with the Soviet Union. Laipenieks admitted that during World War II he had helped catch 200 communist spies, who were then shot by other people.

In 1947 he fled to Chile, where he devoted himself to track and field athletics; then he moved to the United States. Driven by the slogan “Oh sports, you are the world!” Laipenieks went to Mexico in 1964 to train local athletes, and five years later he returned to the United States unhindered despite the fact that he was not an American citizen. Laipenieks worked for the CIA from 1958 to 1967. His mission was to establish contacts with athletes from socialist countries (inviting the athletes to defect to the United States) and with Latvian immigrants who were required to provide Americans with information they were interested in. It later turned out that the CIA had known about Laipenieks’ wartime activities in the Latvian Political Police since 1962. Naturally, the CIA did not consider that sufficiently objectionable for them to refuse the services of the Latvian “trainer.” It was only after talking with the CIA in 1981 that the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations took up the Laipenieks case. But without success: Laipenieks neither went to jail nor was deported, and he died in the United States in 1998.

It is remarkable that the report not only contains Latvian World War II Nazi collaborators, but the leaders of modern Latvia, as well. Before publication of the document by the New York Times, the US Justice Ministry had provided individual copies of the report to investigators, but they had been redacted: several pages that the Justice Department probably considered especially controversial had been deleted from the report. According to the New York Times, the pages cut contained information to the effect that efforts by the US government to get Latvia to prosecute Nazi war criminals were an appalling failure. The newspaper wrote that a series of meetings were held to solve the problem in 2000, but to no avail. That is not surprising in general, given the fact that honors are bestowed on Waffen SS veterans in Latvia today at almost an official level, and the head of Latvia’s Foreign Ministry is a man (Kristovskis) who agrees with “Doctor” Slutsis, who makes his home in the United States and who believes that Latvians and Russians should not receive equal care.

Equally surprising are the facts in the Justice Department’s report about protection afforded by American authorities to former Nazis (assuming it is possible to be a “former Nazi”). True, the Americans had not previously acknowledged cooperating with Nazis escaping justice, but the facts had ceased being secret a long time ago. Let’s consider just Eichmann. The Americans arrested him in 1945 and put him in an internment camp from which he escaped so successfully that he turned up in Argentina in 1950 with a fake passport, living a quiet, comfortable life. He even traveled to Europe in order to bring his family back to Argentina. South America was the unchallenged sphere of influence of the United States and a base of CIA operations, so it was simply impossible that the Americans did not know about Eichmann’s fate. The more so since in 1958 the West German intelligence service BMD gave the CIA information about the location of its wartime enemy and the name under which he was hiding. The CIA accepted the information but concealed it. In 1960, Eichmann was abducted by the Israelis and taken to Israel, where he was put on trial and sentenced to death…

In the 1990s, the American journalist Gregory Douglas published a series of books in the United States devoted to another iconic figure of the Third Reich—the infamous Gestapo chief, SS Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, who had mysteriously disappeared in April 1945. In August of that year, a body bearing documents in the name of Heinrich Müller was found in Berlin and buried in a military cemetery. However, an investigation by experts in 1963 he came to the conclusion that the remains were not Müller’s. That gave rise to a large number of theories about how the Gestapo chief actually went into hiding somewhere in South America. According to information provided by Douglas, Müller lived in the United States and worked for the CIA. Douglas’s books include Müller’s so-called diaries and transcripts of conversations that a CIA official had with him.

In the Diaries we find passages like the following:

“February 23, 1949. The CIA dispatched speedboats to the Baltic Sea and put agents ashore Anti-Russian guerrillas are very active there and in the Ukraine. … What pleasure I derive from reading reports about all of that! Living in the very heart of my former enemies’ country and reading their innermost secrets! Who could have imagined this in April of 1945, when all of Berlin lay in ruins and Germany was dead?”

“April 20, 1949. I am actually writing these lines about noon on April 21 because yesterday evening I was unable to write. Well, there was a party yesterday. … Everything was magnificent: Three types of wine, two boxes of Cuban cigars, many packs of expensive American cigarettes, an eight-course meal. And I finished the evening by playing every conceivable patriotic song on the piano, and everybody accompanied me at the top of their lungs. It was like a real party meeting in a biergarten! The Americans in Germany are arresting people for tricks like that now, and here their officers were singing along with me.”

It goes on in the same vein. Experts consider the revelations in Douglas’s books unproven to say the least and, to put it bluntly—fake. But in light of the published US Justice Department report, his story does not seem totally improbable.

But that is not the main point. The main thing is that in the context of this report, all of the US attempts after the war to shelter numerous Nazi criminals and, before the war in the 1930s, to give Hitler substantial financial, military and political assistance, to the equate Stalin’s Soviet Union with fascist Germany, to place responsibility for starting World War II on the USSR and accuse it of “collaboration and collusion” look even more clumsy and cynical. With a beam like that in its own eye, Washington is clearly unsuited to the role of the world’s ophthalmologist.

Source: New Eastern Outlook