The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Book Review:
The Nazis Next Door

Jan 5, 2015

After World War II ended, more than ten thousand Nazis immigrated to the U.S., according to U.S. Justice Department prosecutors. Eric Lichtblau’s recent book The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men is about how and why government agencies such as the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, INS and NASA helped these Nazis to immigrate to the U.S., and then fed, employed, protected and used them for decades after the war.

These Nazis were participants in massacres and the genocide, concentration camp guards, SS officers, top Third Reich policymakers, leaders of Nazi puppet states, and other Third Reich collaborators. Some were scientists, like Wernher von Braun, so-called "father” of NASA’s Saturn rockets, and Hubertus Strughold, so-called "father” of space medicine, who carried out experiments on humans and, by using slave labor, constructed missiles that killed countless humans.

When these Nazis were exposed, the U.S. government actively blocked their prosecution. When they were finally convicted many decades after their exposure, the U.S. government only deported them, instead of imprisoning them. Finding a country willing to take the Nazis was also a problem, though. As one German official ironically asked a U.S. government official, “Who would want to take back America’s Nazi war criminals?”

While the U.S. government helped the Nazis, their victims were left to languish. Lichtblau writes: "These were the ‘lucky’ ones: hundreds of thousands of Jews, Catholics, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, Roma, and other ‘parasites’ enslaved in Nazi concentration camps who, somehow, had managed to survive Hitler’s genocidal killing machine. Yet even after Germany’s defeat, the survivors remained imprisoned for months in the same camps where the Nazis had first put them to rot."

"Many thousands of the survivors did not leave the Allied camps; some not for months, some not for years, some not at all. Thousands died from disease and malnourishment even after Hitler’s defeat.”

“We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,” wrote President Truman’s special emissary Earl Harrison. When the “hero,” General Patton learned about the report he was fuming: “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”

So, the U.S. government and the Nazis were like-minded. And after the war was over, the U.S. used the Nazis to help IT loot the world.