New York Review of Books Review
IN THE WAKE of World War II, America recruited a few leading German scientists in order to advance our space and military programs and to keep these valuable assets from falling into Soviet hands. This is the broadly accepted script about Nazis in America. In fact, as Eric Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, relates in "The Nazis Next Door," we welcomed approximately 10,000 Nazis, some of whom had played pivotal roles in the genocide. While portions of this story are not new - see Annie Jacobsen's book "Operation Paperclip," for example - Lichtblau offers additional archival information in all its infuriating detail. (He conducted some of his research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, on whose supervisory committee I serve. I had no role in his selection as a fellow at the center.) America began reaching out to leading Nazis months before the Germans surrendered. In March 1945, while the war still raged, the American spy chief Allen Dulles conducted a friendly fireside chat in the library of a Zurich apartment with the Nazi general Karl Wolff, the closest associate of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler for much of the war. The Scotch-lubricated conversation convinced Dulles that Wolff, despite his ties to Himmler and his role as a leader of the Waffen SS, was a moderate who deserved protection. When prosecutors sought to try Wolff, one of the highest-ranking SS leaders to survive, at Nuremberg, Dulles worked to have his name removed from the list of defendants. While Wolff was in Allied custody, he was permitted to take a yacht trip, spend time with his family and carry a gun. Nonetheless, he complained that what he endured was "much more inhumane than the extermination of the Jews." He said the Jews had been gassed in a few seconds, while he did not know how long he would be held. (His imprisonment lasted four years.) While Jews languished in the camps after Germany's defeat ("We felt like so much surplus junk," one survivor said), the United States gathered up Nazi scientists. Had only leading scientists been enlisted, it would have been distasteful if understandable. But of the more than 1,600 scientists brought over, some had pedestrian skills. Others had developed the chemicals for the gas chambers, or conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Even the State Department protested. But we did not stop with scientists. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. sought out spies and informants who had participated in genocide. For these agencies, engaging in murder was acceptable as long as the recruits did not lie about their record. Ultimately, most of these "informants" never provided any valuable information. Some even offered bogus reports. But these intelligence agencies remained their greatest protectors. In the 1980s, when the Justice Department began to hunt war criminals who had lied in order to enter this country, both agencies actively obstructed the investigations. They were also protected by White House officials such as Pat Buchanan, then a top aide to Ronald Reagan, who denounced the Justice Department's "revenge obsessed" and "hairy-chested Nazi hunters" as dupes of the Soviets. And the largest group of Nazis who entered America simply slipped in through "the back door," according to Lichtblau. They gamed the system and immigrated as "refugees," starting new lives as thousands of people perished in the Allied camps. Lichtblau brings ample investigative skills and an elegant writing style to this unsavory but important story. "The Nazis Next Door" is a captivating book rooted in first-rate research. DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT is a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. Her most recent book is "The Eichmann Trial."
Kirkus Review
Outraged account of how the Cold War created an entree for thousands of ardent Nazis to reinvent themselves as Americans. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Washington bureau investigative reporter Lichtblau (Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice, 2008) writes in an urgent, pulpy style, appropriate to his shadowy tale of "America's decades of resolute indifference to the Nazis in its backyard." He deftly manages a rough chronological structure that demonstrates how American views on war criminals fluctuated wildly over time. Beginning with spy chief Allen Dulles' covert 1945 meeting with the top SS general in Italy, efforts were made on behalf of well-connected Nazis, including the CIA's "Paperclip" program for top scientists and the "rat line" to South America maintained by anti-Semitic Catholic clergy. Many fugitives worked as anti-communist provocateurs for the CIA during the 1950s, while in the '60s, J. Edgar Hoover "had no interest in having his agents wasting their time tracking down supposed Nazis in America." But by the '70s, owing to efforts by a few crusading journalists and immigration investigators, "Nazis in America were suddenly a hot topic." The turning point was the 1979 establishment of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which aggressively pursued aging Nazis, like renowned scientist Arthur Rudolph, who'd overseen the V-2 rocket program. Yet with success came backlash; amazingly, the Reagan White House provided Pat Buchanan a platform to attack the investigations and Holocaust research generally. Lichtblau builds suspense by focusing on the long-term fates of individuals like Tom Soobzokov, a power broker among New Jersey Eastern Europeans before being outed as a brutal collaborator; he pushed back aggressively against his accusers and was ultimately killed in a mysterious pipe bombing. Lichtblau utilizes obscure sources and declassified files, tenaciously circling back to a dark reality: Many of the estimated 10,000 Nazis who settled here were involved in the worst aspects of the Holocaust. Fascinating and infuriating corrective to the American mythology of the "Good War." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Until recently, public perception has been that only a small number of Nazis settled in the United States after World War II. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lichtblau's (New York Times) thoroughly riveting account demolishes this myth by revealing the backstory of how and why as many as 10,000 Nazis arrived postwar on America's shores. Through interviews and archival research, the author demonstrates the involvement of the military, the CIA, and the FBI in turning these World War II enemies into Cold War allies in the fight against communism by scrubbing their wartime histories, assisting them in gaming the immigration system to gain residency and citizenship, harnessing their knowledge to fight the Soviet Union, and shielding them from investigations. Lichtblau documents the lengths to which federal agencies would go to protect these assets. In one instance, congressional members derailed an immigration service investigation into the chief scientist of NASA's aerospace medical division, Hubertus Strughold-a man who had knowledge of many human experiments performed on prisoners in concentration camps. Rich in detail, this work is a necessary corrective to our understanding of postwar American history. VERDICT An essential read for all those interested in World War II, the Cold War, and 20th-century history.-Chris Sauder, Round Rock P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
