When
the song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” was popularized by Frank Sinatra in 1964,
it quickly became closely associated with America’s Apollo moon landings and became the first music ever
heard on the moon when astronaut Buzz Aldrin played it on a portable cassette player. Few fans of the song — or Sinatra for
that matter — realized the tune rested on the backs of scientists who just two
decades earlier, had been militantly supportive of Adolf Hitler’s dream of a
master race.
At
the heigh of the Cold War, American law
enforcement and intelligence leaders went to great lengths to recruit former
Nazis and use them as classified, anti-Soviet “assets.” The Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s J.
Edgar Hoover, along with the Central Intelligence Agency
head, Allen Dulles, believed the ex-Nazis’ intel value against the Russians
more than justified what was called a “moral lapse” in their service to the
Third Reich.
Americans
started to become aware of the American government’s link to Nazi spies in the
1970s. Since then, thousands of records from declassified files obtained
through the Freedom of Information Act, show that the government’s Nazi
recruitment went deeper than previously thought.
It
shouldn’t be a surprise that the American government would try to “turn” former
enemties. What is terrifying is the fact
that many of the assets hired by the American intelligene
organizations had been senior Nazi members and were protected by the American
government for decades.
Klaus
Barbie
Nikolaus
‘Klaus’ Barbie, aka the “Butcher of Lyon,” was given a pass by the United
States intelligence services. Barbie was employed to help in America’s
anti-Marxist efforts. When Barbie was fingered by the French, the American intelligene community helped Barbie relocate to
the South American country of Bolivia. While in tk
name of city, Barbie helped his colleagues in America’s Central Intelligence
Agency to capture the revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967. )
Barbie
had been head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, where he had been assigned in
1942 when he was 29. Barbie personally tortured prisons by breaking legs and
arms, administering electroshock and sexually abusing the male, female and
child inmates.
The
U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps recruited Barbie in 1947. The CIC made use
of Barbie, along with other Nazi Party members, to fight communist efforts in
Europe.
In
1980, Barbie helped out in the Bolivian coup which had been put together by
Luis Garcia Meza Tejada. When the dictatorship fell, and the newly elected
government of Hernan Siles Suazo came to power, Barbie was arrested by the
Bolivian police. Bolivia didn’t need the Butcher of Lyon any longer and he was
sent to France where he died in prison of leukemia, cancer of the spine and
prostate cancer.
Operation Paperclip
Operation
Paperclip was the program established by the Office of
Strategic Services, OSS, to bring Germans with the desired background into the
U.S. following World War II. Scientists, technicians and engineers from Nazi
Germany were identified and recruitd for
employment in the U.S. A secondary purpose of Operation Paperclip was to keep
the the Soviet Union from having access to the expertise and knowledge
developed by Nazi Germany.
The
American President, Harry Truman, did not authorize the execution of Operation
Paperclip until 1945. Even when he signed the executive order, Truman
specifically ordered that anyone found to have “…been a member of the Nazi
Party…or an active supporter of Nazi militarism…” be excluded from the program.
The restrictions, if followed, would have made rocket scientists Wernher von
Braun, Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph ineligible. Each of the men had been
pervious idenfied as a “…menace to the security of the Allied Forces.”
As
a work-around to Truman’s anti-Nazi order, the Joint Intelligence Objectives
Agency created false biographies for the scientists. Not being content with
just creating a new future for the valued scientists, the JIOA purged the
scientists’ Nazi Party memberships. Once the Nazism was eliminated, the
scientists were given security clearances by the U.S. government to work in
America.
The
operational name, “Paperclip” came from the ubiquitous paperclips to attached
the scientists’ new resumes to their US Government personnel files.
Wernher von Braun
Few
people in technology’s history create a reaction quite like that by Wernher von
Braun. To some, von Braun was a visionary who realized the potential for human
spaceflight. For others, von Braun is still seen as not being more than an arms
merchant who developed brutal weapons of mass destruction for Hitler’s Germany.
The rocket scientist was a card-carrying Nazi
who use slave labor from concentration camps to build the glboe’s first
ballistic missile. With the Second World War winding down, von Braun
surrendered to the Americans and moved his rocket building team, and talents,
to the United States. Over time, von Braun became a leader in the U.S. space
race. Von Braun’s crown jewel was his developing the Saturn V rocket that
carried men to the moon.
Von
Braun died in 1977 at age 65.
1,000 Nazis. Otto von Bolschwing
Otto
von Bolschwing was a mentor and key aide to Adolf Eichmann.
America hired Bolschwing to spy the U.S. government in Europe and gave him a
residence in New York City in 1954. In 1960, Eichmann was captured in Buenos
Aires by Israeli MOSSAD agents. Officials from the CIA worked overtime to hide
von Bolschwing’s connection to Eichmann resulting in von Bolschwing being
shielded from prosectuion. CIA officials were concerned that von Bolschwing
would be connected to Eichmann as a “…collaborator and fellow conspirator…and
the…publicity could prove embarrassing to the US.”
When
word about von Bolschwing’s involvement reached the US Justice Department in
1981, the Justice Department wanted to deport him. Death beat them to it as
Bolschwing died later that same year
Aleksandras Lileikis
Aleksandras
Lileikis had been linked to the machine gun massacre of
60,000 Jews in Lithuania. Lileikis’ CIA file noted that he was connected with
the shooting of the Jews in Vilna. Despite the known connection, Kileikis was
hired by the CIA in East Germany in 1952. Lileikis finally immigrated to the
U.S. in 1956 where he livved quietly for almost 40 years. His Nazi past was
discovered by prosecutors and Lileikis was deported in 1994.
Nazi Spies
Lileikis
wasn’t the only Nazi spi which worked for American organizations in the 50s and
60s, he’s only the best known.
Other
former Nazis were used by American intelligence agencies:
1.
U.S. Army officials trained several Nazi officers in Maryland in paramilitary
warfare with an eye towards a possible invasion of Russia.
2.
In Virginia, a top advisor to Hitler gave classified brings on Soviet affairs.
3.
An ex-Nazi guard was used in Connecticut to study Soviet bloc postage stamps
looking for hidden messages.
The
thinking that percolated throughout the American intelligence community started
from the top. CIA’s Dulles firmly believed that “moderate” Nazis could be
useful to America and the FBI’s Hoover personally approved ex-Nazis as
informants. Both men, Dulles and Hoover, blew off any accusations of the
ex-Nazis’ war crimes as “Soviet propaganda.”
Not Just
Scientists and Informants
Nazis
heading into the U.S. isn’t limited to scientists and spies. Others came into
America as well. Some of them lied on their travel documents and others, well,
the American government just looked the other way.
John
Demanjuk is one example and Johann Breyer
is another. Demjanjuk, who died in 2012, was a retired Ukrainian-American auto
worker. Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011, in Germany, for war crimes which
included the murder of 27,900 Jews while he was a guard at the extermination
camp near Sobibor.
Breyer,
whose mother was American, enlisted in the German army when he was 17. Assigned
to Auschwitz during the war, Breyer ultimately emigrated to America and was
granted citizenship in 1957.
The
Office of Special Investigations, OSI, identified him as a Nazi soldier during
a routine cross-check of released German records and U.S. immigration records.
In
2013, Germany granted a warrant for Breyer’s arrest and accused him of helping
in the slaughter of over 215,000 Jews. Arrested at his home in Philadelphia in
2014, Breyer was held without bail while he waited on a hearing to extradite
him to Germany. His already frail health deteriorated rapidly while he was in
custody. Breyer died in July 2014, a month before his August 21, 2014 scheduled
hearing.
Breyer
is considered by many researchers to possibly be the last former Nazi where
extradition to Germany is sought by prosecutors.
The full scope and scale of
the American intelligence operation may never be known.
According
to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at the American University, estimates
the CIA, FBI and other agencies made use of over 1000 ex-Nazis as spies,
informants and scientists after the war. Norman Goda, a University of Florida
historian, feels the final county may be much higher.
Regardless
of the final tally, if it is ever known, there is one reality that is
soberingly clear.
American
agencies hired many ex-Nazi police officials, scientists and collaborators who
were guilty of war crimes. Information was available that the men utilized by
American agencies were flawed and compromised men.
Note: Bukhglobal contributed to this article.
