Policy#1: US Hunts Down and Prosecutes Nazis and Nazi Collaborators
Recently I opened the Washington Post and saw an interesting article on the US Office of Special Investigations' (OSI) hunt for Nazi war criminals during the 1980s, 90s and early 21st century. Author and journalist, Debbie Cenziper's article is based on her 2019 book, Citizen 865 : The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America. The WaPo article is called "The Nazis and The Trawniki Men: How a team of prosecutors and historians uncovered the details behind an SS training camp in occupied Poland — and exposed Nazi collaborators hiding in plain sight in America." https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/01/23/how-department-justice-team-exposed-nazis-hiding-america/?arc404=true It is a good article, but like the book, Citizen 865, it leaves critical details about both the OSI and overall US policy toward Nazis in the US after WW2 out of the account. It also focuses emphatically on one collaborator, Jakob Reimer (the titular "citizen 865") whose story is not typical of those POWs that were recruited by the Germans in Poland and Ukraine because he was ethnically German, and thus was able to become a German citizen fighting in the German Army-- not a paramilitary group comprised of Slavs who were defined as inferiors to be conquered by the Nazis. By making a German citizen and sergeant emblematic of the Trawniki men in her article, Debbie Cenziper blurs ethnic distinctions that were crucial within the Nazi ambit.
During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, 3 million soldiers died in German POW camps (Cenziper). POWs were worked to death, starved, tortured and often executed by the Germans who were under strict orders from Hitler to treat them this way. The plan was to occupy the USSR as"living space" (Lebensraum) exploit all its resources, and turn the "lowly" Slavs into servants if not slaves to the "Master Race." Forced labor and enslavement were extremely common in German occupied lands, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Mistreatment, such as starvation and torture, was the main cause of death. During the early 1940s, forced laborers comprised about 20% of the German workforce. However, as Cenziper notes in her article, those Ukrainians that were "perceived to hold strong anti-Soviet sentiments...[were thought to make] reliable recruits for managing land that the Germans planned to conquer."
There is a tortured and tangled set of questions and issues still hotly debated regarding just who was really sympathetic to the Nazis in Ukraine, Belarus etc. and who was trying to survive by convincing Germans that they were sympathizers. That anti-Semitism was widespread in the region is, unfortunately, well established. But even those who were anti-Semitic and did not think highly of Stalin and the Bolsheviks, were aware that the German conquerors hated "the Motherland" and the Slavs inhabiting it. Most Ukrainian nationalists resisting the Soviets had little sympathy for the Nazis planning to reduce Ukraine to "Lebensraum" or living space for Germans to extract natural resources and rule over those they didn't kill or deport. While it is true that some anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalists greeted the Germans enthusiastically, believing false promises about Ukrainian independence in return for collaboration, most did not. Indeed, More than 4.5 million Ukrainians joined the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany, and more than 250,000 served in Soviet partisan paramilitary units. This is a much larger number than than that of the willing collaborators. (see Potichnyi: 1997: http://www.infoukes.com/upa/related/military.html )
Citizen 865 (aka Jakob Reimer)--who features so prominently in Cenziper's article and book-- was a Ukrainian Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans. But, as I mention above, his story is atypical. Like many other Nazi recruits during the war against the USSR, Reimer came to the Germans as a POW. He was captured fighting against the Germans as a second lieutenant in the Red Army when his platoon was captured by the Germans. However, unlike most of those captured, he was descended from German Mennonites and thus had "German blood" and language skills-- both distinguishing him from the Slavs of Ukraine, Poland and Belarus whom Germans saw as being only one notch above Jews in their racial hierarchy. Unlike the Slavs that were recruited by the Nazis, Reimer was granted German citizenship in 1944 when Hitler made all ethnic German military and police personnel eligible for German citizenship. Reimer, like other Trawniki men, served as a camp guard and took part in the liquidation of Jewish ghettos in Poland. Unlike most, though, the Germans awarded him with a medal, granted him citizenship and promoted him to the rank of Guard First Sergeant in 1945. In 1952 he applied for US citizenship, and was naturalized in 1959. He lived in the NY metropolitan area as a salesman escaping notice until the OSI investigations of the 1980s. In 1992 the OSI prosecutors filed a denaturalization suit which led to his being stripped of US citizenship and slated for deportation. He challenged the decision, but it was upheld by the US Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit) in 2004. He died in 2005 before leaving the US. So, in a nutshell, that is the case of "citizen 865."
The OSI was established to investigate and bring justice to bear on those who committed crimes against humanity and international law. Founded in the 1960s, the main emphasis was finding and prosecuting Nazi war criminals living in the US. While it investigated and prosecuted several Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe (with mixed success), it did little to deal with the much more troubling matter of the US government protecting high level Nazi war criminals who were welcomed to the US in order to work as scientists under a secret plan known as Operation Paperclip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Policy #2: US Gives Nazi Scientists Citizenship and Prestigious Jobs to Fight Cold War
Annie Jacobsen's disturbing book on Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America: focuses on 21 of the 1,600 German scientists that were given not only citizenship but prestigious jobs in government programs and American universities. Of these 21 cases, 8 had worked directly with Hitler, Himmler or Göring; 15 were active Nazi Party members; 10 served in paramilitary squads like the SA and SS; and six were tried at Nuremberg. These men (and others like them not profiled in Jacobsen's book) had developed the rockets that brought death to civilians in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Antwerp among others. They had developed some of the nastiest bio-weapons known to humanity, and some conducted "medical experiments" on Jews in the death camps. (see NYTimes Review of the book: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/operation-paperclip-by-annie-jacobsen.html )
Further, none of these German scientists was a Ukrainian or Polish POW taken from the allied Red Army, and then given the choice of collaborating or being worked to death, starved or perhaps simply shot or hanged as was common. I am certainly not defending the Hiwis (willing collaborators) including the Trawniki men. Their atrocities-- often committed in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe-- are a matter of record. However, there is a double standard here in terms of US policies. The heinous crimes of some of the 1,600 Germans in Operation Paperclip were overlooked, despite protests from several within the Dept. of War at the time, and such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Einstein and several prominent Rabbis. I could not even find an entry for Operation Paperclip or the names of prominent US-protected Nazis like Wernher von Braun in the index of Cenziper's somewhat moralistic book subtitled "The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America." I wondered, "Why didn't the OSI take any of this on?" What I found is that they did investigate one US-protected rocket scientist and Operation Paperclip beneficiary, Arthur Rudolph, in 1984. He promptly agreed to leave the US if the OSI would refrain from prosecuting him, and both sides agreed. He was never brought to justice. What were the crimes of Arthur Rudolph?
He not only developed weapons that were used to bomb civilians in England, but he headed up operations at a terrible underground facility called Mittlewerk tasked with the production of V-2 missiles. The workers consisted of slaves that ended up in concentration camps. Thousands of these imprisoned laborers died at Mittlewerk while building the missiles. Rudolph lived as a respected German citizen after leaving the US. But even after doing so, West Germany protested the treatment of Rudolph along with several well-placed US scientists and a director of US National Archives on WW2. They argued that Rudolph was under orders to use the slaves, and that it was not his job to choose or recruit them. "Rudolph never employed slave labor. He was an employee too," one of his defenders, German-American physicist, Friedwardt Winterberg, stated (see https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0905/ateam2.html ) In other words, he was just taking orders by trying to build the missiles as quickly as possible even if it killed (as it did) many of the workers! If working Nazi slaves to death in order to make WMD that killed untold numbers of civilians in Europe isn't being one of "Hitler's hidden soldiers in America," then I don't know what is.
Yet in her book, Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America, Debbie Cenziper, whose book ostensibly covers the OSI investigations and prosecutions, devotes just one small and incidental paragraph to this troubling target of the OSI hunt for war criminals in America. This is important because it is the only OSI case that directly challenged the status of any of the Operation Paperclip recruits. It is the only time that any of them were formally accused of being war criminals who committed crimes against humanity. Yet Cenziper is all but silent on the one collision of OSI and Operation Paperclip that almost went to court. This is the entire paragraph; every thing in the book pertaining to the Arthur Rudolph OSI case:
"Rosenbaum [former Director of the U.S. DOJ Office of Special Investigations (OSI)] had launched and led the the development of OSI's case against NASA scientist Arthur L.H. Rudolph, who was accused of using slave laborers at a factory that produced rockets for the Nazi war machine. Rudolph, one of more than 100 rocket engineers who were secretly brought to the US after the war, had agreed in 1984 to give up his citizenship and move back to Germany." (Cenziper: p. 74)
The OSI, to be clear, did argue that Rudolph was responsible for working these slaves to death. Nevertheless, they made a deal get him out of the country quietly, safely and without a trial. What does this say about the consistency of the US Cold War policy regarding Nazis? How can the seeming contradictions be explained?
The most frequently argued defense of Operation Paperclip is simply that the US had to scoop up these scientists or the Soviets would do so. To maintain the US' military edge and national security interests during the Cold War the government had to place pragmatism over principles. But as Jacobsen points out, the Soviets had a very different way of getting the knowledge they wanted out of German scientists-- and it worked, as the stockpiles show. Their equivalent to Operation Paperclip was Operation Osoaviakhim. The approach was completely different from Paperclip. They would capture scientists they wanted literally at gunpoint, and then put them to work without giving them the prestige and celebrity of, say, Wernher von Braun. After the "Great Patriotic War"against the Germans there was no patience for the very people who tried to overrun their country in the name of racial superiority. If for no other reason, the moral issue was not lost on the Soviets who did not treat these scientists with kid gloves. Some were given official rank in the Red Army, but they worked under the strict and watchful eye of the state. The Soviets drained their brains for information, and often enough, let them leave once they had enough knowledge to continue building on the advances made with their skills. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim )
As Annie Jacobsen points out, the Soviet approach indicates that there was no need to embrace or valorize the Nazis in order to gain the strategically important knowledge the US sought. There was no need to give these men makeovers, turning them into "respectable" scientists and academics. But there was an additional factor according to the author. Just as the Soviets hated the Germans after WW2, the Germans hated the USSR, and thus (it was thought by US officials) would make loyal Cold Warriors. If this rationale really did play a role in shaping the Operation Paperclip policies, it seems fair to ask whether or not such a seemingly Faustian bargain was really justified, even on pragmatic grounds. And if one argues that it is, then isn't it somewhat hypocritical to go after the Hiwis/collaborators, many of whom were originally Red Army soldiers captured while fighting against the Nazis? It's a question that goes to the heart of US claims to moral exceptionalism in a morally ambiguous world where things are rarely black and white.
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References/Related Reading:
-Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America by Debbie Cenziper: Hatchette Books, New York: 2019 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316449652/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0316449652&linkId=a06a9ae3bc19e3c29e3911e9c9be8879
-The Nazis and the Trawniki Men (article) by Debbie Cenziper: Washington Post, 1/23/20
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/01/23/how-department-justice-team-exposed-nazis-hiding-america/?arc404=true
-Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America: Annie Jacobsen: Little, Brown and Company, NY: 2014 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BAXFBI2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
-The Peter J. Potichnyi Archives on Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Ukraine (see materials covering the years 1941-1945)-- University of Toronto Library Online: http://www.infoukes.com/upa/related/pjpc.html
-Ukraine During WWII: History and its Aftermath - ed. Yury Boshyk: Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton 1986 http://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/14255/file.pdf
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