Sunday, November 02, 2014

When the US government hired what it called "moderate" Nazis

From Karim: "Regarding the story of Nazis working for US intelligence which you posted about (). Democracy Now covered the story in more detail in an interview with the author of the book The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (Part 1Part2:  Part 1 on YouTube: ).

They discuss how ‘CIA head, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under Eisenhower[…] believed that there were, quote-unquote, “moderate Nazis”,’ and with J. Edgar Hoover developed the ‘strategy of recruiting ex-Nazis as cold warriors, as anti-Soviet assets who, they believe, could gather intelligence for the U.S.’ Although unsrprisingly later many of ‘the Nazis were found to be liars and cheats and embezzlers, and in a couple cases they were even found to be Soviet double agents.’

The US ‘brought over, under something called Program Paperclip, like 1,600 Nazi scientists. These were engineers, doctors, jet propulsion experts, things like that. The most famous among them was Wernher von Braun, who was one of the guiding hands in getting us to the moon in 1969. And officially, under the policies put in place by Truman and Eisenhower after the war, these were not supposed to be, quote-unquote, “ardent Nazis,” whatever that may mean. But, you know, in fact, these were people who were directly involved in, for instance, running slave labor factories, where thousands and thousands of people died in making Hitler’s rockets. These were doctors who were involved in medical atrocities. They then found homes in the United States as American scientists. Many of them became U.S. citizens. Many of them became honored for their work in the United States.’

Dulles also protected SS General Karl Wolff, one of Himmler’s deputies. ‘In fact, even when he was nominally a prisoner as a POW, he was allowed to wear a gun. He went boating on the weekends in Austria. He led sort of a charmed life after the war, thanks to the help of Allen Dulles, who went on to become the first director of the CIA.’

They go on to describe the disgusting anti-Semitism of US Army General Patton, who was partly responsible for continuing the incarceration of the survivors of the concentration camps and had a strange admiration for the Germans. In some cases he also put Nazi POWs back in charge of guarding the survivors of those camps, believing these Nazis to be the best qualified for the job!"