During Cold War, CIA And FBI Hired Over 1,000 Nazis As Spies, Limited Investigations Of Those Nazis
from the minor-war-crimes dept
A new book by Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, apparently details how the FBI and CIA hired over 1,000 Nazis during the height of the cold war, forgiving them their past sins, so long as they might help spy on the Soviet Union.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet ?assets,? declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis? intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called ?moral lapses? in their service to the Third Reich.
The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of ?minor war crimes.?
You can argue whether or not this moral cost-benefit analysis was reasonable, but it appears that the CIA further sought to block investigations into those Nazis for some of their war crimes — which seems to tilt the balance pretty strongly in favor of immoral.
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis? massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
Meanwhile, the FBI was carefully hiding those Nazis from the Justice Department (which the FBI is a part of), even though the DOJ had a department trying to find them:
In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department?s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist ?sympathizers.? Five of the men were still active informants.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that Hoover not only protected the Nazis, but he went after journalists who were investigating the US’s hiding of those Nazis:
In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.
John Fox, the bureau?s chief historian, said: ?In hindsight, it is clear that Hoover, and by extension the F.B.I., was shortsighted in dismissing evidence of ties between recent German and East European immigrants and Nazi war crimes. It should be remembered, though, that this was at the peak of Cold War tensions.?
Kinda thinking that we shouldn’t even bother with comments on this article, because the CIA and FBI have already hit Godwin’s Law.
Filed Under: allen dulles, cia, fbi, j. edgar hoover, nazis
Comments on “During Cold War, CIA And FBI Hired Over 1,000 Nazis As Spies, Limited Investigations Of Those Nazis”
That’s gotta be the fastest example of Godwin Law. Allow me:
Those damn Commies, worse than the Nazis!
Ahem.
Man, it’s a good thing absolutely no-one lives in Europe other than Nazi war-criminals, wouldn’t it be crazy if they protected former Nazi’s in order to turn them into informants, when instead they could have tried them for their crimes and found countless non-Nazi people to spy instead?
/s
In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.
Someone being critical about nazis, and investigating them, being considered a threat to national security. Just… just let that one sink in for a moment. Being critical of nazi made you a threat to US ‘national security’. Hell, that almost makes the current claims of national security seem sane and rational in comparison(almost).
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left-wing journalist
Left-wing. Communist. Devil. Boom, logic thrown out the window.
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Someone makes a valid comparison to Nazis.
Boom, logic thrown out the window as everyone has a panting Pavlovian response to Godwin’s law.
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My bad, I wasn’t mocking his comment but rather the fact itself.
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Oh i didn’t think you were. I was just pointing out another instance of the “hear keywords, turn off brain” phenomenon you mentioned.
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Whenever Pavlov’s name is mentioned, all I ever think of is Raspberry Pavlova. I can’t decide if this is irony at my expense, or karma at the expense of Pavlov, for being a dog-tormenting little bastard. Either way, I’m salivating and have to go and find cake. 🙂
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Whenever dog-tormenting little bastards are mentioned all i ever think of is Hansel and Gretal, because everyone knows that witch was a Nazi who cooked dogs alive in her ovens, using Raspberyy Pavlova to bait them into the left-wing of her solitary commune deep in the devil’s woods.
Oh how they would salivate.
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i really liked your comment, btw. it twisted my brain in knots. =)
Re: Re: Left Wing Journalist
Viz and to Wit:
Left/Right wing journalist
A scumbag who writes stories I don’t like.
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You’ve got to remember though, WWII was over, Nazism/Fascism had lost and was thoroughly discredited, and now there’s this big, bad, horrifyingly bad USSR that was threatening to turn everything it touched Communist (domino theory), was armed with as many nukes as the West, and the KGB was making serious inroads in places like Italy, France, Britain, IndoChina, South America, Cuba, … Communist sympathizers really were everywhere, including in legitimate political parties in many countries.
Subverting the freedom of the Fourth Estate by interfering with leftist journos would’ve been mosquito pee compared to the prospect of giving even an inch to the Soviets.
Since reading “The Mitrokhin Archive”, I don’t doubt the CIA was scared !@#$less. The KGB really did have a lot of tenticles burrying deep into the West’s governments.
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” Hell, that almost makes the current claims of national security seem sane and rational in comparison(almost).”
Nah, just the same old same old. People at certain levels of government remain just as convinced today as they were then that they can do no wrong.
… and these are the very same agencies that are busy saying “trust us with everything”…
Apparently some of them were allowed to make policy.
They got us to the moon as well
There used to be an old joke floating around the NASA brass that if you took all the staff that worked on any Apollo mission, lined them up, and shouted “Zieg Heil!”, roughly half of them would respond….
Re: They got us to the moon as well
There were some brilliant minds in the Nazi Govt. Hitler wasn’t some stupid kid, he knew he needed to maintain the technological advantage if he wanted to have any chance and thus he gathered as many brilliant individuals as he could. And as easy as it seem to label and condemn them many didn’t know about the atrocities of the Nazi regime at the time. I’m not defending all of them but we need to be careful to judge.
Still, the joke is humorous in a quite dark way 😉
Re: Re: They still dismissed Einstein's relativity
…on the grounds that Einstein was Jewish.
And that delayed their version of the atom bomb a bit, potentially enough to have changed history.
Incidentally, Josef Mengele lived a full life and died a free man of old age. We’re going to have to come to terms that people who do really evil shit sometimes escape justice.
More importantly, we need to remember that this stuff can and will happen again, and is happening right here in the US. where it is still accepted and appropriate to treat non-whites and impoverished (or even less-affluent) as social undesirables.
We don’t have a final solution yet (I believe). But we certainly do have a Jewish question, and we’re marching further every day down that trail the Nazis (re-)blazed.
And more people who do despicable things will escape justice because they’re evasive, or because they’re useful.
Re: Re: Re: They still dismissed Einstein's relativity
Um, you mean that’s wrong? Why do you consider being impoverished as not socially undesirable?
I kid. I’ve seen a lot of this recently. Here, “homeless” is pretty much equivalent to drug adicted, mentally deficient, likely petty (or other) crime oriented, etc.
I like Jews (or those I know), but I have a question about Zionism. There is a difference. I am not a fan of nationalism as practiced by anyone. Shalom.
Re: Re: Re:2 They still dismissed Einstein's relativity
I hope you’re not meaning to imply you don’t know to what I refer nor are willing to brief yourself by way of a search. Here: lets look it up together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question
The implication of any question that phrased as How do we treat subculture X (Or more accurately How do we treat subcultures other than Y, Z and N) is that the subject of the question is not to be treated as every8ne else is.
So yeah, here in the US, we’ve already started imprisoning or overworking our undesirables. It’s only a small step to decide that since they’re already treated horribly, it’s a humane step to speed them to their graves.
Re: They got us to the moon as well
“The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists.”
— Ice Station Zebra
American citizens: potential threats.
Actual war criminals: helpful assets.
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Very well done, you summed up the entire insane situation in under 10 words.
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I suspect the CIA’s tolerance of “moral lapses” as with regard to these former Nazis, is why they’re such indescribably criminal bastards and practitioners of barbaric torture today…
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Well, the latter already know which side their bread is buttered on.
not to diminish this...
but it is OLD news that the gehlen network of spies were rolled up into unka sammie’s spies…
also, they were used for the operation gladio type stuff…
WHICH by itself is one huge steaming pile of eee-vil…
shit, we are ‘protecting’ NUMEROUS old spooks and such who are KNOWN terrorists/murderers for stuff that has happened MUCH later than that stuff… the cuban who blew up cuban planes, sabotaged their shit, etc, is given complete immunity…
the tables turned, WE would be screaming bloody murder, but since they are *OUR* terrorists, they are -you know- *good* terrorists…
because ANY terrorism in furtherance of Empire is *good* terrorism…
If there is one thing we can say about ourselves as Americans...
… at least we are honest about our bullshyte.
Oh how dare they even talk with those evil nazis who very likely lost their entire families to the firebombings…
Lets not pretend that every nazi had a single reason to be a nazi and it was to kill a certain little group, most of them joined up because of the attrocities commited against them.
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Replace “Nazi” with the name of any other group…
Go on, I dare you. It’ll be fun to see what you come up with.
For being such a Nazi hating nation the US is suprisingly similar. Nazi’s and Americans can both be characterized as nationalist fanatics.
The real difference between the two is that the Nazi’s lost their war.
The US is currently working very diligently to eradicate all those that believe differently than they do (or those that won’t sell them resources like oil).
They have a real hate on for muslisms and islamics.
How are they any different?
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“How are they any different?”
Uhh, heh heh heh, well uh… Sorry, that question made me braindead for a moment there.
Did you just compare ‘Murica to Nazi Germany as if they were morally equivalent? I’m guessing you are a digital person, and analog and scale are beyond your mental capacity…
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“The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world. ” http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm
Versus roughly 11 million deaths by the NAZI’s…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_and_death_toll
My analog scale is working just fine
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The real difference is that Nazi Germany had a clearly stated agenda and were efficient about implementing it … the Americans in contrast lie about what their agenda is and haphazardly flail about killing whoever happens to be near the target.
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Ok, i’ll bite cuz i got 2 hours of sleep last night and i’m feeling looney.
Your analog scale may be working but it’s on the fritz.
WW2 lasted six years, with an estimated 6 million Jews killed. That’s a kill ratio of 1 million per year.
Conversely from your sources, since WW2 ‘Murica has killed 30 million people at the high end during a 69 year period, which is a 403,000 kill ratio per year, give or take an innocent civilian.
So the numbers speak for themselves, and your analog moral equivalency antennas clearly need some attenuation.
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I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but I would think that the ratio of civilian to military casualty would be a pretty important factor here as well.
While I don’t agree with a lot of the US policies when it comes to military action, they do not seem to be leading a lot of civilians into large holes and then covering them up.
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WWII did not “just” cost 6 million jews their life. A multiple of Russians died (not to mention a few other nationals), but those are probably counted as a good thing in U.S. reckoning.
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So your argument is “America is not as immoral as Nazis were, they yearly kill count is only half as big!”
It doesn’t really matter if you’re going 0.8c or 0.4c when the local speed limit is 50 kph.
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No, my argument was equating America to the Nazis is stupid, so here’s a stupid argument for why.
If you can look at Nazi Germany and look at America and say yourself, “damn, those two are the same” then i’m afraid you’ve lost all sense of proportion. There may be similarities, we may very well be on the road to becoming them, but there’s still a long way to go and we are not them.
In the interim let’s keep a level head shall we, because you know who didn’t have a level head? Hitler!
Re: Re: Re:4 "A Long way to go"
I don’t think anyone here is equating the United States to Nazi Germany. I think they’re comparing the two and acknowledging frightening similarities.
We don’t scapegoat the Jewish peoples so much (though some still do), as we like to scapegoat the impoverished, non-whites, crazies and anyone who deviates too much from the mainstream (goths, Juggalos, et. al.) we already are in the process of depriving them of liberty and property, and all-too-commonly life.
I think America compares to the Third Reich rather too similarly for my comfort. And that’s a road we’re speeding along at a good clip.
Re: Re: Re:5 "A Long way to go"
Eh, the parent said:
“How are they any different?”
That turn of phrase is equating one to the other in my book. But if you don’t want to take my book for it, here’s Webster’s:
“to treat, represent, or regard as equal, equivalent, or comparable”
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They had way bigger ovens.
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“For being such a Nazi hating nation the US is suprisingly similar.”
And never forget that, prior to WW2, the US loved and admired Hitler — and that many of the Nazi party’s worst practices (such as eugenics) were lifted directly from what the US had already been doing.
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So would you say it’s a cultural thing (Nazi, American, Amish, Kibbutz), or a human thing (Hitler, Napoleon, Jimmy Carson, Gandhi)?
You know, i heard a story once about how the Aborigines always made sure there were never any winners or losers when they played soccer. Could have been made up for all i know, but it does beg the question: where does personal choice fit into all of this?
You’ll have to forgive me John, i’m sooo tired right now.
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There is a human tendency to dominate and subjugate other humans, but I think this specific form of it is cultural. The US loved Hitler because the US is, culturally, a very corporatist culture, and Hitler was a corporatist posterboy.
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There’s a lot of truth to that. Hitler played corporate leaders like a fiddle, IBM included. Even after they were nationalized, they were enriched while it was going on. Such is fascism. Suckers!
Remember though, they were all worried about filthy communist boogymen.
Mussolini made the trains run on time too. Woohoo!
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Remember though, they were all worried about filthy communist boogymen.
Yep. And so, it seems, are many of us…
Communism is just swapping one bad form of governance (corporatism) for another.
Re: Re: Re:4 Surely you're not saying people cannot be goverened.
Maybe you’re saying that the forms of government we’ve had so far aren’t very good at it. I’d agree with that.
Design a better one.
And engineer a means to get us there without corruption.
That’s what the constitutional framers were doing. That’s what we gotta do.
Re: Re: Re:4 I should add...
We haven’t actually seen communism in action. In the case of the USSR we saw a proto-government that
You can make a deductive argument that communism is a poor form of government, but as of now, you can’t make an inductive argument to that effect.
Here in the US, I was spoon fed as a child in public school that communism is bad and evil and wrong and eats babies. I was not at all taught to follow the data and logic as to why.
Re: Re: Re:5 Gaah! Pre-coffee posting again!
…In the case of the USSR we saw a proto-government that was eventually to be supplanted by a communist system. It never happened. …
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To be fair, most of the west, and maybe the world, had long been infatuated with eugenics (not to mention lots of other silly Nazi-ish stuff). The Nazis just went with it (took it to the extreme). Lots of supposed “civilized countries” thought nothing of forced sterilization or wiping out native aboriginal culture world-wide.
Personally, I think the history books should be updated. Their definition of when the “Dark Ages” ended needs to be extended by at least a thousand years. “The Enlightenment”, my ass. We’re not there yet.
Re: Re: Re: Pedantic point re: Dark Ages
The early middle ages were not dark because they were grim or plague-ridden or shit-covered. They were all those things, but they were dark for being poorly documented. Unlike the classical age, chonicled by Roman historians and the modern age, chronicled by academists and recording devices, few people gave enough of a shit during the dark ages to record exactly what happened. (The Church did somewhat, but they still withhold entire libraries of information that might make the Church look bad.) so more than other eras we depend more on archeological evidence to understand the dark ages.
Re: Re: Re:2 Pedantic point re: Dark Ages
Yes, and there was also a lot of re-writing of the record going on. There’s lots of disfigured statues out there (Paganism!), art works painted over are still being discovered (ibid.), and great texts of antiquity were over-written by religious scribes re-using parchment, etc.
Still, I don’t believe we’ve reached the enlightenment yet. Maybe when we get flying cars, phasers, and those things that do, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.”
Nazis
And what is the problem? This is coming from communist sympathizers and apologists for radical Islam.
Re: Nazis
Fear the Boogeyman! Fear him, I say!!11Eleventy-one!
– Federale
How convenient
Oh, naturally that is a good excuse.
Likewise, the Nazis really had good reason to kill all those jews since Germany was strapped for cash after WWI reparations and the total distribution of wealth among jews made a genocide reasonably profitable.
It would be a shame to let scrupleless killers and sadists go waste when you have them readily available, whether you are FBI (like here), CIA (torture reports anybody?), SA or SS.
I have one thing to say,
Oscar Schidler was a nazi.
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Indeed he was, and he’s not the only man to wear a Nazi pin while subverting the idea of Nazism itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
The Japanese had decided that the Chinese were Untermensche (if you will) and were in the process of slaughtering them.
Lesson learned: Nazi is as nazi does and there were far too few John Rabes and Oskar Schindlers.
"Minor war crimes"
Um…. I kinda thought war crimes, by definition, were not minor. But perhaps it’s my reliance on the actual legal definition — rather than the CIA’s creative interpretation — that’s confusing me.
Beat the enemy by becoming the enemy……then make it “legal”………after the fact
Aint freedom grande!
"our little secret"
Is this really any different from United States’ “the end justifies the means” policy today?
Federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and DEA have always worked with criminals of all sorts, as those are the very people with the knowledge, technical skills, and insider connections that enable the agency to accomplish its goals. That these people have done –or are still doing– something illegal or immoral is rarely more than a minor consideration. In reality, its a huge benefit, since “our little secret between us” helps ensure continued loyalty and obedience.
Because one should never question informants who are motivated by the simple idea of throw someone else under the bus or you’re next.
Like that CI they sent into a mosque to root out the secret terrorists… he was so pushy they asked him to leave and reported HIM to the FBI as a possible threat.
A fascist government agency stealing!! Whooda thunk it?
I really cannot understand how anyone can be surprised by this.
Operation Paper-Clip was run specifically to get as many Nazis out of Germany and into America through Canada as possible.
NASA owes it origins to these men and women from Germany.
Before the war got into full gear, a group of US companies including Alcoa and Ford were caught trying to overthrow the US government for Hitler.
They simply told the feds that if charged, they’d supply the Germans only and close down their US operations.
After the War ended, these same companies received millions of US taxpayer’s dollars in reparation for their factories in Germany that were destroyed by Allied bombing.
American Industry – like any Capitalist industry anywhere – loves the idea of Fascism. Free slave labor. Cheap Child labor. Secret Government For Profit, Blackmail, Coercion, massive surveillance programs…. These are the things that make them need to change the sheets at night.
Read the Elkhorn Manifesto. Learn about your own history.
—
Didn’t Nazis build the rockets for America’s space program?
Re: Nazi Rockets.
No, Americans built the rockets for America’s space program. Yes we had a lot of German scientists, some emigrants from before the war and some after.
But space launch vehicles are big, sophisticated contraptions. We used some German ideas in our rockets. We had to invent most of the parts here. Vehicles that would carry a payload beyond the Earth’s gravity and into orbit or outer space or to the moon we had to invent here.
A small correction...
“Kinda thinking that we shouldn’t even bother with comments on this article, because the CIA and FBI have already hit Godwin’s Law.”
Not quite.
“Godwin’s law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one’s opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as “playing the Hitler card”. The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics, or racial superiority, nor, more debatably, to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies[citation needed], if that was the explicit topic of conversation, because a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate, in effect committing the fallacist’s fallacy.”
To paraphrase:
If yer actually talking bout NAZIs, then Godwin’s Law does not apply.