Report: U.S. recruited Nazis to help during Cold War

Report: U.S. recruited Nazis to help during Cold War

Written by Eric Lichtblau, the author of “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” the New York Times piece says that American agencies saw former Nazis of all ranks as "significant anti-Soviet assets", and for that reason proceeded to aggressively recruit them in the 1950s.

"They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called 'moral lapses' in their service to the Third Reich," writes Lichtblau.

Some of those were suspected of direct involvement in World War II war crimes, said the article, and quoted Holocaust scholar at American University Richard Breitman as stating that "all in all, the American military, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war."

Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian on the declassification team, said that "the full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher, but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible."

The CIA thus hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s "even after concluding he was probably guilty of 'minor war crimes'," while in 1994, "a lawyer with the CIA pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania," the article said, quoting a government official.

The CIA even helped former SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, "a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the 'Final Solution'," who also "wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews," immigrate to the U.S.

"After the war, the CIA not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a 'a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his (Nazi) party activities', the agency wrote," the New York Times article said.

It further noted that long-time CIA director Allen Dulles "believed 'moderate' Nazis might be useful to America," while FBI director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover "personally approved some ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed accusations of their wartime atrocities as Soviet propaganda."

According to the New York Times article, the CIA "declined to comment for this article," while none of the Nazis recruited by the U.S. are believed to be alive today.

The liberal website Talking Points Memo noted that the report came only a week after the Associated Press revealed that public benefits worth millions of dollars have been paid to dozens of suspected Nazi collaborators even after they were expelled from the United States.

One of them is Jakob Denzinger - an ethnic Croat from Germany and after the war, a successful businessman who in 1989 fled to Germany "after Nazi hunters showed up." He later moved to Croatia, where he to this day collects monthly benefits worth USD 1,500, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.