Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #731 Interview with John Loftus about “America’s Nazi Secret”

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Intro­duc­tion: For decades, we’ve accessed the research of the hero­ic John Lof­tus, author of (among oth­er titles) Amer­i­ca’s Nazi Secret.

In this updat­ed, sup­ple­ment­ed ver­sion of his 1982 vol­ume The Belarus Secret, John includes mate­r­i­al that had been cen­sored from the orig­i­nal book. Much of John’s work high­lights malfea­sance on a vast scale, cen­tered in the Unit­ed States on Jus­tice and State Depart­ment ele­ments.

Those ele­ments, in turn, were exe­cut­ing the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic will of the Rob­ber Barons–monopolistic indus­tri­al­ists and financiers whose col­lec­tive efforts man­i­fest ted as the Gild­ed Age in the late nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies.

Curbed by the Theodore Roo­sevelt’s Anti-Trust Act, the “Male­fac­tors of Great Wealth” (as TR called them) secured the pass­ing of the Webb-Pomerene act, a loop­hole that pre­cip­i­tat­ed much of the dis­as­trous his­to­ry of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

Decry­ing what they viewed as exces­sive and restric­tive “reg­u­la­tion” here in the Unit­ed States, U.S.-based transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions invest­ed their prof­its from the indus­tri­al boom of the 1920’s abroad, pri­mar­i­ly in Japan and Ger­many. This process might well be viewed as the real begin­ning of what is now known as “glob­al­iza­tion.” [FTR#’s 99, 361, 426, 511 and 532 present an overview of the rein­vest­ment of the wealth gen­er­at­ed by the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al boom of the 1920’s in Ger­man and Japan­ese strate­gic heavy indus­try. It was this cap­i­tal that drove the engines of con­quest that sub­dued both Europe and Asia dur­ing the con­flict.]

Seek­ing to dom­i­nate the glob­al econ­o­my, the “Male­fac­tors” sought to fuse the total­i­tar­i­an states of Nazi Ger­many, the U.S.S.R. and Sau­di Ara­bia, dom­i­nat­ing the fos­sil fuels indus­try and cre­at­ing indis­sol­u­ble indus­tri­al car­tels.

Far from being brought to jus­tice for their active trea­son against the Unit­ed States, the Rob­ber Barons and their enablers suc­cess­ful­ly hid their wrong­do­ing.

John points out that, at the end of World War II, (Sul­li­van and Cromwell part­ner and OSS offi­cer) Allen Dulles cre­at­ed a mech­a­nism for cov­er­ing up the pro­found involve­ment of many dom­i­nant ele­ments of the U.S. pow­er elite with the Axis, Nazi Ger­many in par­tic­u­lar.

That mech­a­nism was an intel­li­gence net­work com­posed of much of the cream of the Nazi nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, to be put to work for the Unit­ed States–ostensibly at least. When Dewey lost the 1948 elec­tion, that cre­at­ed a prob­lem. From that point for­ward, there have been, in effect, two CIA’s–one for the Democ­rats and one for the Repub­li­cans.

The Repub­li­can CIA incor­po­rat­ed the Nazi and fas­cist ele­ments with whom Dulles (and mem­bers of the Bush fam­i­ly) col­lab­o­rat­ed dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. This ele­ment of the CIA does the bid­ding of the transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, often fol­low­ing an agen­da that is not in the best inter­ests of the Unit­ed States.

Much of the pro­gram high­lights con­tin­ued attempts at sup­press­ing this infor­ma­tion. While work­ing for the Jus­tice Depart­ment, John was threat­ened with impris­on­ment and dis­bar­ment for his inves­ti­ga­tion of Amer­i­ca’s Nazi Secret. A doc­u­men­tary film mak­er with whom Lof­tus has worked had her finan­cial records con­fis­cat­ed with­out expla­na­tion. (A Cana­di­an doc­u­men­tary about Nazis involved with con­tem­po­rary Slo­va­kian affairs was sup­pressed due to threats of lit­i­ga­tion by Slo­va­kian nation­al­ist, bil­lion­aire and ura­ni­um mag­nate Steve Roman, a busi­ness part­ner of Richard Nixon.)

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The use of what was to become Auschwitz to use Sile­sian coal, Ger­man patent tech­nol­o­gy and slave labor and Sovi­et rail links to pro­duce avi­a­tion fuel; the Nazis’ use of Amer­i­can cor­po­rate exec­u­tives in Ger­many dur­ing the war; Frank Wis­ner’s secret gov­ern­ment-with­in‑a government–the OPC; the gen­e­sis of the Green Berets–growing out of Frank Wis­ner’s OPC; the role of Allen Dulles in the found­ing of Sau­di Ara­bia; the his­to­ry of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood; the links between the U.S. indus­tri­al and finan­cial elite and those of the Axis pow­ers of World War II; the Bush fam­i­ly’s pro­found links to Nazi finance and indus­try; the Vat­i­can’s piv­otal involve­ment with the Axis pow­ers and post­war inter­na­tion­al fas­cism; John’s use of a phone-card sting to help uncov­er the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood oper­a­tions in the U.S.; John’s law­suit against Sami al-Ari­an, that led to the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002; the Cru­sade for Free­dom and the gen­e­sis of the Nazi/GOP con­nec­tion; Hen­ry Kissinger’s role in forg­ing the post­war Nazi “free­dom fight­er” net­works run by Frank Wis­ner and the OPC.

1. The gen­e­sis of the events and process­es ana­lyzed by John Lof­tus in his book could be said to orig­i­nate with the Webb-Pomerene act of 1918.

. . . . Ted­dy Roo­sevelt, arguably the most hon­est of the Repub­li­can Pres­i­dents, was the only one in the GOP who tried to bring the Rob­ber Barons to their knees. He per­suad­ed Con­gress to pass extreme­ly strict anti-trust, anti-car­tel, and anti-monop­oly leg­is­la­tion. In 1918, the Rob­ber Barons fought back, and some­how con­vinced Con­gress to pass the Webb-Pomerene Act. This lit­tle-known loop­hole per­mit­ted the cre­ation of Amer­i­can trusts, monop­o­lies, etc., as long as it was done over­seas. Because of this loop­hole law, invest­ment cap­i­tal left Amer­i­ca in a great flood, one of the con­tribut­ing caus­es of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depres­sion. . . .

Amer­i­ca’s Nazi Secret by John Lof­tus; Trine Day [SC]; 2010936158; p. 13

2. The Jus­tice Depart­ment played a role in the actu­al draft­ing of Webb-Pomerene.

. . . . It was the Jus­tice Depart­ment itself which helped draft the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918 to carve loop­holes in Ted­dy Roo­sevelt’s “trust bust­ing” leg­is­la­tion. This enabled the Rob­ber Barons to estab­lish trusts, car­tels and monop­o­lies over­seas, drain­ing Amer­i­ca of invest­ment cap­i­tal, and helped to bring about the crash of 1929. . . .

Ibid.; p. 51.

3. Over the years, For The Record has fea­tured much dis­cus­sion of the U.S./Nazi indus­tri­al connection–much of it in past dis­cus­sion with John and/or use of his inves­tiga­tive mas­ter­pieces.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the depth of this con­nec­tion is Third Reich’s employ­ment of U.S. cor­po­rate exec­u­tives in Ger­many dur­ing the war, aid­ing the Nazi war effort! Briefly interned after the war, they were ulti­mate­ly set free.

. . . Dur­ing the Nurem­berg tri­als, one of the pros­e­cut­ing attor­neys, the same Wal­ter J. Rock­ler who lat­er became my boss at OSI, dis­cov­ered a Ger­man doc­u­ment list­ing the thir­teen Amer­i­can banks that had secret­ly worked for the Third Reich dur­ing WWII. After his inves­tiga­tive unit was shut down, Rock­ler kept the Nazi bank list to pre­vent it from being shred­ded. . . .

Ibid.; p. 9.

4. More on these “res­i­dent collaborators”–who were briefly interned.

. . . The Ger­man bankers that Rock­ler was try­ing to pros­e­cute at Nurem­berg had hired Amer­i­can and British cor­po­rate executives—who had then become the secret res­i­dents of Camp Ashcan/Dustbin. It was the Spe­cial Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­er­al Vic­tor Swearin­gen who had kept all the Amer­i­can and British mon­ey­men hid­den from the nosey Nurem­berg pros­e­cu­tors.

Polit­i­cal smear tac­tics forced Rock­ler out before I could tell him why all Nazi finan­cial crimes inves­ti­ga­tions kept get­ting closed down. He was get­ting much too close to the truth. The mon­ey that fund­ed the banks and cor­po­ra­tions of the Third Reich came from Wall Street and “the City,” Lon­don, England’s finan­cial dis­trict and Wall Street equiv­a­lent. Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt knew about it, and so did his Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury, Hen­ry Mor­gen­thau. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 11–12.

5. Some of the cor­po­rate crim­i­nals who were [tem­porar­i­ly] interned at Ashcan/Dustbin were quite con­fi­dent of their acquit­tal, due to the influ­ence of their cor­po­rate asso­ciates.

. . . He was the Jus­tice Depart­ment lawyer who let free all of the Amer­i­can cor­po­rate exec­u­tives who had stayed in Ger­many to help their Nazi clients. These busi­ness­men had lit­er­al­ly giv­en aid and com­fort to the ene­my dur­ing the war. All the striped suit trai­tors were held in a joint prison camp code named Ashcan/Dustbin.

The prison camp was under British author­i­ty, but the guards were all Amer­i­cans. One of the guards told me years lat­er that one of the pompous pris­on­ers boast­ed that his friends at the Chase Man­hat­tan Bank would take care of him. “Are you sure they would even want to hear your name?” the guard asked, con­fi­dent that no Amer­i­can busi­ness would ever help some­one accused of trea­son.

The pris­on­er was right. The guard was wrong. The Spe­cial Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed States closed all of the trea­son cas­es in Occu­pied Ger­many. Not a sin­gle cor­po­rate offi­cer ever went to jail for doing busi­ness with the Nazis, either in Amer­i­ca or the Unit­ed King­dom. The Jus­tice Depart­ment cov­ered it all up. More than a hun­dred Amer­i­can trai­tors were returned home after many prof­itable years of serv­ing Hitler. The Army’s orig­i­nal inves­tiga­tive files, code­named ASHCAN and DUSTBIN are still off lim­its to “pro­tect the pri­va­cy” of the Amer­i­can cit­i­zens involved. . .

Ibid.; pp. 4–5.

6. Hen­ry Kissinger’s polit­i­cal gen­e­sis is to be found at the nexus of the U.S./Nazi post­war col­lu­sion.

. . .Kissinger was recruit­ed as a pro­fes­sion­al spy for Dulles short­ly after the end of the war in Europe. Although there is no evi­dence that he per­son­al­ly recruit­ed Nazis, Kissinger ran the intel­li­gence file room where records of Nazi recruit­ment were kept. He then trans­ferred to Har­vard where he spe­cial­ized in recruit­ing for­eign stu­dents for espi­onage. Lat­er he worked for Dulles dur­ing the glo­ry days of Office of Pol­i­cy Coor­di­na­tion (OPC). He was hired as a con­sul­tant for a pri­vate group known as Oper­a­tions Research Office, which planned to use for­mer Nazis as agents behind Russ­ian lines in the event of World War III. Men­tion of Kissinger’s clas­si­fied work was cen­sored from the orig­i­nal man­u­script of this book. . .

Ibid.; p. 11.

7. In addi­tion to Kissinger’s work at Har­vard on the Nazi “free­dom fight­er” pro­gram, the Naz­i­fi­ca­tion of U.S. aca­d­e­m­ic ide­ol­o­gy dur­ing the Cold War is exem­pli­fied by an amus­ing episode in John’s book–his raid on the offices of Alexan­der Dallin–the chair of the his­to­ry depart­ment at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.

While work­ing for the OSI divi­sion of the Jus­tice Depart­ment, John learned that some of the miss­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion on the impor­ta­tion of Nazi war crim­i­nals had been pur­loined by Dallin!

. . . I found some of the miss­ing doc­u­ments when I raid­ed the offices of Pro­fes­sor Alexan­der Dallin, Chair of the His­to­ry Depart­ment at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. The ter­ri­fied pro­fes­sor quick­ly turned over box­es of unpub­lished Ein­satz­grup­pen reports, records of the SS mobile killing units in East­ern Europe. These records con­tained the names of Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors from Belarus and Ukraine, men who had earned their spurs by car­ry­ing out the mass mur­der of their own coun­try­men. Sim­i­lar records con­cern­ing Pol­ish col­lab­o­ra­tors with the Nazis were pulled from the Nurem­berg tri­als before the Rus­sians could get their hands on them.

The most dis­tress­ing stolen doc­u­ment that Pro­fes­sor Dallin pro­duced from his hoard was the unpub­lished mem­oirs of a senior SS offi­cer, Friedrich Buchardt, who had writ­ten a his­to­ry of the Nazi occu­pa­tion of East­ern Europe. Pro­fes­sor Dallin had pla­gia­rized Buchardt’s man­u­script for his own famous work, Rus­sia Under Ger­man Rule. Buchardt had been the leader of VorKom­man­do Moskau, one of the SS mobile killing units which spe­cial­ized in recruit­ing local col­lab­o­ra­tors from Belarus and the Ukraine as spies. . .

Ibid.; p. 10.

8. Buchardt’s man­u­script was deemed to be so valu­able because it pro­vid­ed valu­able infor­ma­tion for the U.S. recruit­ment of Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors, many of them war crim­i­nals. They then went to work for Frank Wis­ner and Allen Dulles’ fledg­ling Office of Pol­i­cy Coor­di­na­tion. The OPC was the vehi­cle used by the Rob­ber Barons’ cor­po­rate lawyers to bypass de-Naz­i­fi­ca­tion rules and put the Nazis to work for U.S. intelligence–in essence, it WAS the “Repub­li­can CIA.”

Among the war crim­i­nals that Wis­ner put to work for OPC was Dr. Franz Alfred Six, sprung from the defen­dan­t’s dock at Nurem­berg. His sen­tence com­mut­ed by U.S. High Com­mis­sion­er for Ger­many (and Chase Man­hat­tan Bank chair­man) John J. McCloy.

. . . Six, how­ev­er, was at that moment on tri­al at Nurem­berg for his war crimes. Wis­ner asked Gen­er­al Clay to inter­cede with the Nurem­berg pros­e­cu­tor and judges. Whether Clay took such action is unknown, but Six received only a twen­ty-year prison term, while the rest of the Ein­satz­grup­pen com­man­ders were sen­tenced to death. In 1950, Clay’s suc­ces­sor, John J. McCloy com­mut­ed the sen­tence to time served. . . .

Ibid.; p. 162.

9. Wis­ner and Dulles’ “Free­dom Fight­ers” pro­gram evolved into the Green Berets.

. . . With the dis­band­ing of the few remain­ing cadres of Wis­ner’s secret army, the Spe­cial Forces were tak­en over by the Army and became the nucle­us of the Green Berets. . .

Ibid.; p. 232.

10. After review­ing the ori­gins and nature of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, John relat­ed a fas­ci­nat­ing gam­bit in which he and pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor Bill Warn­er were able to “make” many of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ter­ror­ists in the Unit­ed States. Orig­i­nat­ing in the inves­ti­ga­tion of Sami Al-Ari­an, the strat­a­gem entailed buy­ing phone cards for use by the ter­ror­ists.

. . . . With [Pro­fes­sor Sami] Al Ari­an’s sup­port, and finan­cial help from the Saud­is, Al Ari­an’s clan pur­chased a series of auto deal­er­ships in west­ern Flori­da. One of them was on land owned by Al Ari­an. Stolen lux­u­ry cars across the USA were fun­neled through the clan’s net­work to Dubai, where they were re-sold for two or three times their price by a car net­work run by one of Al Qaeda’s “gold­en chain” financiers. Old­er vehi­cles were turned into car bombs to kill Amer­i­can sol­diers in Iraq. Two of the car bombs have been traced through the Clan’s net­work through their vehi­cle iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (VIN) num­bers.

A bril­liant pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor named Bill Warn­er of Sara­so­ta, Flori­da, came up with an extreme­ly inno­v­a­tive method of track­ing the mem­bers of the Clan’s ter­ror­ist net­work. He approached me for a list of all Al Ari­an’s friends and clan con­tacts. Warn­er then sent out an adver­tise­ment to each of them enclos­ing a pre-paid cell phone card. The pitch was to try our new phone com­pa­ny’s inter­na­tion­al call ser­vice free for nine­ty days, and then decide whether to become a per­ma­nent sub­scriber.

One of the idiots in the clan actu­al­ly used our call­ing card. In one stroke, we had become the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’s tele­phone ser­vice. As a tele­phone com­pa­ny, we law­ful­ly pur­chased the phone bills of every­one our cus­tomer con­tact­ed, alleged­ly to recruit new cus­tomers. We used the phone bills to iden­ti­fy the clan’s over­seas con­tacts, and then I cross-matched the phone records against the ter­ror­ist attacks of Hamas, PIJ, and Al Qae­da, all of which are sub­sidiaries of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.

The results were aston­ish­ing. We had the call­ing records of the Al Qae­da cell in Ceu­ta as they planned their abortive attack on ship­ping off Gibral­tar. We could tell that every time a clan mem­ber in Cal­i­for­nia called a cell phone in a refugee camp in Jor­dan, a ter­ror­ist attack on Israel would take place that same day. Mr. Warn­er and I assem­bled a nation­wide map of ter­ror­ist logis­ti­cal cells in Amer­i­ca com­plete with their over­seas tele­phone con­tacts. We did not trust the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s FBI, so we pre­sent­ed our cell phone map to NORTHCOM mil­i­tary intel­li­gence.

Despite our regrets, NORTHCOM had to ask the FBI for court autho­rized search war­rants top lace taps on the phones and com­put­er ter­mi­nals of these ter­ror­ists’ sup­port­ers. The FBI typ­i­cal­ly rewrote the war­rants as if they had done the inves­ti­ga­tion. Nei­ther Bill Warn­er nor I ever received a pen­ny of the promised mil­lion dol­lar reward mon­ey. As we feared, some­one in the FBI tipped off the ter­ror­ists. They all stopped using the cell phones and call­ing cards we had been trac­ing they all went silence at once.

Worse, the FBI closed all inves­ti­ga­tions by oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies into the Flori­da clan just as they had closed Oper­a­tion Green Quest, the Immi­gra­tion Ser­vice’s attempt to trace ter­ror­ist fund­ing of Al Ari­an from the Saud­is. The Saud­is’ “Inter­na­tion­al Insti­tute for Islam­ic Research (IIIR)” is banned as a known fund­ing source for ter­ror­ism world­wide, but like the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, it enjoys a strange immu­ni­ty from the Unit­ed States Depart­ment of Jus­tice. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 263–265.

NORTHCOM ran all of our phone num­bers through their ter­ror­ist data base. “It lit up like a Christ­mas tree!” The agent exclaimed. NORTHCOM knew that ter­ror­ists over­seas were call­ing Amer­i­can phone num­bers, but had no idea who they were con­tact­ing or why they were call­ing. Our lit­tle tele­phone com­pa­ny had pro­vid­ed U.S. intel­li­gence with a near­ly com­plete map of every ter­ror­ist cell in the USA and abroad that called the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood for help.

11. Indica­tive of the con­tro­ver­sial nature of the mate­r­i­al dis­cussed in John’s book is the fact that doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Clair Ragge was raid­ed by the IRS with­out expla­na­tion. Records and finan­cial doc­u­ments were con­fis­cat­ed.

. . . Dur­ing the last four years, inde­pen­dent film­mak­er Claire Ragge has done a thor­ough inquiry into the new­ly declas­si­fied files on the men who fund­ed Hitler. Her film ten­ta­tive­ly titled “Amer­i­can Secrets” should be ready for release in 2011, along with a web­site list­ing each his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment sourc­ing each of the film’s alle­ga­tions. Ms. Ragge has done a remark­able job, and has uncov­ered many secrets that would oth­er­wise have escaped pub­lic scruti­ny. . . . How­ev­er, there is some con­cern that the film may nev­er see the light of day. The IRS has sud­den­ly seized Ms. Ragge’s bank accounts with­out even a pre­text of notice. I have seen this sort of thing hap­pen before. I once helped the Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion do a doc­u­men­tary on Slo­va­kian Nazis liv­ing open­ly in Cana­da. There was some superb film footage of the Pope bless­ing a new Slo­va­kian Cathe­dral while the cam­era panned over the Nazi war crim­i­nals sit­ting in the audi­ence. No one in Cana­da eager saw that film because the CBC caved in under the threat of end­less lit­i­ga­tion from Steven Roman, a Slo­va­kian nation­al­ist who hap­pened to be the rich­est man in Cana­da (and Richard Nixon’s part­ner in a Cana­di­an-Amer­i­can ura­ni­um min­ing busi­ness.) . . .

Ibid.; pp. 19–20.

12. Con­clud­ing with an anec­dote about what John has endured, the pro­gram sets forth a fright­en­ing array of med­ical prob­lems John has over­come, while wag­ing his Good Fight against the Pow­ers That Be.

Dur­ing the 1970’s and 1980’s, I had more than two dozen surg­eries for bro­ken facial bones and sinus dam­age from a para­chute acci­dent when I was an Army Offi­cer. The VA missed a few things. In the 1990’s, I was also diag­nosed by pri­vate physi­cians with colon can­cer, prostate block­age, kid­ney stones, and shoul­der dam­age, each of which required surgery. In 2010, the VA final­ly dis­cov­ered that I had two dis­placed hips, sev­er­al bro­ken ribs, bro­ken ver­te­brae and crushed disks, which they had some­how missed dur­ing the last four decades of treat­ment. The VA con­ced­ed that, more like­ly than not, these undis­cov­ered injuries had been sus­tained in my Army para­chute acci­dent. There are third world coun­tries that pro­vide bet­ter med­ical care than Amer­i­ca gives its dis­abled vet­er­ans. . . .

Ibid.; p. 46.

Discussion

8 comments for “FTR #731 Interview with John Loftus about “America’s Nazi Secret””

  1. Dur­ing one of the many inter­views he gave to you, John Lof­tus men­tionned once: “There is no conspiracy...well...it is rather 5% con­spir­a­cy and 95% pure greed...” I think the series of books that John pre­sent­ed to us over the years express that with great elo­quence. Basi­cal­ly, the bot­tom line, is that we are being gov­erned by crooks... That is sad, but that’s the truth. Your last blog entry, “The Sky is the er...Limit”, gives anoth­er exam­ple of the cor­rup­tion and malfea­sance in which we live in. We are slow­ly slid­ing into fas­cism or, more pre­cise­ly, bar­barism...

    I will nev­er for­get that John was in fact the LAST per­son to be able to read the file on the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood before it was sanitized...Wow! And not to men­tion his work on the Third Reich per se, of course! If we have just the slight­i­est chance to defeat fas­cism, we owe it to him for the most part.

    The last para­graph of the post gives the impres­sion that John had much more mis­ad­ven­tures than just a para­chute accident...Am I right?

    I have ordered the book, by the way, and I am eager to begin read­ing.

    Keep the fight!

    Posted by Claude | December 30, 2010, 9:57 pm
  2. Hi, i wish that this books among oth­er of the books men­tioned by Mr. Emory on his WFMU shows were trans­lat­ed to the span­ish, i find all this very inter­est­ing and impor­tant.

    Posted by Charles Wipman | December 31, 2010, 2:23 am
  3. [...] Demo­c­rat branch and the Repub­li­can branch (for that mat­ter, see the  inter­view with John Lof­tus FTR #731). It is prob­a­bly the truth. How­ev­er, I fail to see how the Demo­c­rat branch would be able to [...]

    Posted by The Libyan operation: another piggy back coup? | lys-dor.com | July 12, 2011, 10:18 am
  4. How do we know that John Lof­tus is not just “lim­it­ed hang­out”? Throw­ing a few “bones” to the more seri­ous researchers while basi­cal­ly main­tain­ing the offi­cial sto­ry about 9–11?

    His the­sis seems to be that “Islam-o-fas­cists” are real­ly to blame for 9–11 and are just “blow-back” from all the nefar­i­ous deal­ings of U.S. Intel­li­gence agen­cies over the years.

    Lof­tus seems to dis­miss any pos­si­bil­i­ty of active com­plic­i­ty by ele­ments of U.S. Intel­li­gence in 9–11.

    He’s throw­ing us bones yet still the offi­cial line is main­tained: “Mus­lims did 9–11”

    “There was no con­spir­a­cy”

    Posted by mike | February 10, 2012, 6:41 pm
  5. I think Mike that you have not read John Lof­tus at all. I sug­gest that you read him first and talk lat­er. You will see that he says things far more com­plex and sub­tle than the gross reduc­tions and car­i­ca­tures that you are sug­gest­ing. He DOES say, by the way, that U.S. intel­li­gence is involved. Do your home­work, please. The read­ers of this web­site are learned, skilled and intel­li­gent. This com­men­tary does­n’t pass the test. Sor­ry.

    Posted by Claude | February 10, 2012, 9:28 pm
  6. [...] FTR# 731: Inter­view with John Lof­tus on America’s Nazi Secret This entry was post­ed in Greed, Intel­li­gence Oper­a­tions, Nazism and tagged Amer­i­ca’s Nazi Secret, Arab Nazis, Arabs, British Secret Ser­vice, CIA, Holo­caust, Islamists, Jews, Jus­tice Depart­ment, Mon­ey, Mus­lims, Nurem­berg Tri­als, Oil, State Depart­ment, The Secret War Against The Jews, Unholy Trin­i­ty: The Vat­i­can The Nazis and The Swiss Banks. Book­mark the perma­link. ← Jean-Luc Mélan­chon et le total­i­tarisme de gauche dans toute sa splen­deur [...]

    Posted by John Loftus on the secret war against the Jews | Lys-d'Or | February 25, 2012, 5:03 pm
  7. AP IMPACT: US lim­bo for Nazi sus­pects ordered out

    Jul 30, 4:15 AM (ET)

    By AMY FORLITI and RANDY HERSCHAFT

    MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — At least 10 sus­pect­ed Nazi war crim­i­nals ordered deport­ed by the Unit­ed States nev­er left the coun­try, accord­ing to an Asso­ci­at­ed Press review of Jus­tice Depart­ment data — and four are liv­ing in the U.S. today. All remained eli­gi­ble for pub­lic ben­e­fits such as Social Secu­ri­ty until they exhaust­ed appeals, and in one case even beyond.

    Qui­et Amer­i­can legal lim­bo was the fate of all 10 men uncov­ered in the AP review. The rea­son: While the U.S. want­ed them out, no oth­er coun­try was will­ing to take them in.

    That’s cur­rent­ly the case of Vladas Zajanck­auskas in Sut­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts. It’s the case of Theodor Sze­hin­skyj in West Chester, Penn­syl­va­nia. Of Jakiw Pal­ij in New York City. And of John Kaly­mon in Troy, Michi­gan.

    All have been in the same areas for years, stripped of cit­i­zen­ship and ordered deport­ed, yet able to car­ry out their lives in famil­iar sur­round­ings. Dozens of oth­er Nazi war crimes sus­pects in the U.S. were also enti­tled to Social Secu­ri­ty and oth­er pub­lic ben­e­fits for years as they fought depor­ta­tion.

    The Unit­ed States can deport peo­ple over evi­dence of involve­ment in Nazi war crimes, but can­not put such peo­ple on tri­al because the alleged crimes did not take place on Amer­i­can soil. The respon­si­bil­i­ty to pros­e­cute would lie with the coun­tries where the crimes were com­mit­ted or ordered — if the sus­pects ever end up there.

    In the 34 years since the Jus­tice Depart­ment cre­at­ed an office to find and deport Nazi sus­pects, the agency has ini­ti­at­ed legal pro­ceed­ings against 137 peo­ple. Less than half — at least 66 — have been removed by depor­ta­tion, extra­di­tion or vol­un­tary depar­ture.

    At least 20 died while their cas­es were pend­ing. In at least 20 oth­er cas­es, U.S. offi­cials agreed not to pur­sue or enforce depor­ta­tion orders, often because of poor health, accord­ing to a 2008 report by the Jus­tice Depart­ment. In some cas­es, the U.S. gov­ern­ment agreed not to file depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings in exchange for coop­er­a­tion in oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions, the report said.

    But the key stum­bling block has been the lack of polit­i­cal will by coun­tries in Europe to accept those ordered to leave.

    “With­out any doubt, the great­est sin­gle frus­tra­tion has been our inabil­i­ty, in quite a num­ber of cas­es now, to car­ry out the depor­ta­tion orders that we’ve won in fed­er­al courts. We can’t car­ry them out because gov­ern­ments of Europe refuse to take these peo­ple back,” Eli Rosen­baum, the long­time head of the Jus­tice Depart­ment agency charged with inves­ti­gat­ing accused Nazi war crim­i­nals, said in the 2011 doc­u­men­tary “Elu­sive Jus­tice: The Search for Nazi War Crim­i­nals.”

    Jus­tice offi­cials declined to make Rosen­baum avail­able for an inter­view.
    ——————-

    Arti­cle con­tin­ues with pro­files and details at link:

    http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130730/DA7RNC0O0.html

    Posted by Swamp | July 30, 2013, 7:13 am
  8. http://www.neurope.eu/news/wire/ap-investigation-nazi-war-crime-suspects-collected-millions-dollars-us-social-security‑0

    AP Inves­ti­ga­tion: Nazi war crime sus­pects col­lect­ed mil­lions of dol­lars in US Social Secu­ri­ty
    by
    Asso­ci­at­ed Press
    20.10.2014 — 03:00
    Expelled Nazis paid mil­lions in Social Secu­ri­ty
    by DAVID RISING, RANDY HERSCHAFT and RICHARD LARDNER, Asso­ci­at­ed Press — 19 Octo­ber 2014 18:00–04:00

    His plas­tics com­pa­ny in the Rust Belt town of Akron, Ohio, thrived. By the late 1980s, he had acquired the trap­pings of suc­cess: a Cadil­lac DeV­ille and a Lin­coln Town Car, a lake­front home, invest­ments in oil and real estate.

    Then the Nazi hunters showed up.

    In 1989, as the U.S. gov­ern­ment pre­pared to strip him of his cit­i­zen­ship, Den­zinger packed a pair of suit­cas­es and fled to Ger­many. Den­zinger lat­er set­tled in this pleas­ant town on the Dra­va Riv­er, where he lives com­fort­ably, cour­tesy of U.S. tax­pay­ers. He col­lects a Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ment of about $1,500 each month, near­ly twice the take-home pay of an aver­age Croa­t­ian work­er.

    Den­zinger, 90, is among dozens of sus­pect­ed Nazi war crim­i­nals and SS guards who col­lect­ed mil­lions of dol­lars in Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments after being forced out of the Unit­ed States, an Asso­ci­at­ed Press inves­ti­ga­tion found.

    The pay­ments flowed through a legal loop­hole that has giv­en the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment lever­age to per­suade Nazi sus­pects to leave. If they agreed to go, or sim­ply fled before depor­ta­tion, they could keep their Social Secu­ri­ty, accord­ing to inter­views and inter­nal gov­ern­ment records.

    Like Den­zinger, many lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the U.S. fol­low­ing World War II, and even­tu­al­ly became Amer­i­can cit­i­zens.

    Among those who ben­e­fit­ed:

    —armed SS troops who guard­ed the Nazi net­work of camps where mil­lions of Jews per­ished.

    —an SS guard who took part in the bru­tal liq­ui­da­tion of the War­saw ghet­to in Nazi-occu­pied Poland that killed as many as 13,000 Jews.

    —a Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tor who engi­neered the arrest and exe­cu­tion of thou­sands of Jews in Poland.

    —a Ger­man rock­et sci­en­tist accused of using slave labor to build the V‑2 rock­et that pum­meled Lon­don. He lat­er won NASA’s high­est hon­or for help­ing to put a man on the moon.

    The AP’s find­ings are the result of more than two years of inter­views, research and analy­sis of records obtained through the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act and oth­er sources.

    The Jus­tice Depart­ment denied using Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments as a tool for remov­ing Nazi sus­pects. But records show the U.S. State Depart­ment and the Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion voiced grave con­cerns over the meth­ods used by the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s Nazi-hunt­ing unit, the Office of Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tions.

    State offi­cials deroga­to­ri­ly called the prac­tice “Nazi dump­ing” and claimed the OSI was bar­gain­ing with sus­pects so they would leave vol­un­tar­i­ly.

    Since 1979, the AP analy­sis found, at least 38 of 66 sus­pects removed from the Unit­ed States kept their Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits.

    Leg­is­la­tion that would have closed the Social Secu­ri­ty loop­hole failed 15 years ago, part­ly due to oppo­si­tion from the OSI. Since then, accord­ing to the AP’s analy­sis, at least 10 Nazi sus­pects kept their ben­e­fits after leav­ing. The Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion con­firmed pay­ments to sev­en who are deceased. One liv­ing sus­pect was con­firmed through an AP inter­view. Two oth­ers met the con­di­tions to keep their ben­e­fits.

    Of the 66 sus­pects, at least four are alive, liv­ing in Europe on U.S. Social Secu­ri­ty.

    In new­ly uncov­ered Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion records, the AP found that by March 1999, 28 sus­pect­ed Nazi crim­i­nals had col­lect­ed $1.5 mil­lion in Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments after their removal from the U.S.

    Since then, the AP esti­mates the amount paid out has reached into the mil­lions. That esti­mate is based on the num­ber of sus­pects who qual­i­fied and the three decades that have passed since the first for­mer Nazis, Arthur Rudolph and John Avdzej, signed agree­ments that required them to leave the coun­try but ensured their ben­e­fits would con­tin­ue.

    Long-liv­ing ben­e­fi­cia­ries can col­lect hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in pay­ments.

    A sin­gle male who earned an aver­age wage of $44,800 a year and turned 65 in 1990, the year after Den­zinger did, would receive near­ly $15,000 annu­al­ly in Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits, accord­ing to the Urban Insti­tute, a non­prof­it pub­lic pol­i­cy group in Wash­ing­ton. That’s $375,000 over 25 years. The amounts are adjust­ed for infla­tion.

    The Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion refused the AP’s request for the total num­ber of Nazi sus­pects who received ben­e­fits and the dol­lar amounts of those pay­ments.

    Spokesman William “BJ” Jar­rett said the agency does not track data spe­cif­ic to Nazi cas­es. A fur­ther bar­ri­er, Jar­rett said, is that there is no excep­tion in U.S. pri­va­cy law that “allows us to dis­close infor­ma­tion because the indi­vid­ual is a Nazi war crim­i­nal or an accused Nazi war crim­i­nal.”

    The agency also declined to make the act­ing com­mis­sion­er, Car­olyn Colvin, or anoth­er senior agency offi­cial avail­able for an inter­view.

    The Jus­tice Depart­ment declined the AP’s request for an offi­cial to speak on the record. Spokesman Peter Carr said in an emailed state­ment that Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments nev­er were used as an incen­tive or as a threat to per­suade Nazi sus­pects to depart vol­un­tar­i­ly.

    “The mat­ter of Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits eli­gi­bil­i­ty was raised by defense coun­sel, not by the depart­ment, and the depart­ment nei­ther used retire­ment ben­e­fits as an induce­ment to leave the coun­try and renounce cit­i­zen­ship nor threat­ened that fail­ure to depart and renounce would jeop­ar­dize con­tin­ued receipt of ben­e­fits,” Carr said.

    The depart­ment opposed the leg­is­la­tion in 1999, Carr acknowl­edged, because it would have under­mined the OSI’s man­date to remove Nazi crim­i­nals as expe­di­tious­ly as pos­si­ble to coun­tries that would pros­e­cute them.

    Speed was a key fac­tor.

    Sur­vivors of the Holo­caust who made the Unit­ed States their home after the war had been forced to share it with their for­mer Nazi tor­menters. That had to change, and fast, the OSI’s pro­po­nents said. If sus­pects were to stand tri­al, they need­ed to be found and oust­ed while they were alive. The OSI and its back­ers did­n’t want death to cheat jus­tice.

    Yet only 10 sus­pects were ever pros­e­cut­ed after being expelled, accord­ing to the depart­men­t’s own fig­ures.

    At his home in Osi­jek, Den­zinger would not dis­cuss his sit­u­a­tion. “I don’t want to say any­thing,” he told the AP in Ger­man as he rest­ed on his walk­er in the hall­way of his apart­ment.

    But Den­zinger’s son, who lives in the U.S., con­firmed his father receives Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments and said he deserved them. “This isn’t com­ing out of oth­er peo­ple’s pock­ets,” Thomas Den­zinger said. “He paid into the sys­tem.” Plus his father is pay­ing 30 per­cent in tax­es. “They should be tak­ing out noth­ing,” he said.

    Anoth­er for­mer Nazi camp guard, long­time Mon­tana res­i­dent Mar­tin Hart­mann, lives in Berlin and also is col­lect­ing Social Secu­ri­ty, accord­ing to a per­son with knowl­edge of Hart­man­n’s finances who request­ed anonymi­ty because the per­son did not want to be asso­ci­at­ed with Hart­man­n’s Nazi his­to­ry. Hart­mann, 95, left the U.S. in 2007, just before a fed­er­al judge issued an order to revoke his cit­i­zen­ship.

    The loop­hole also means new sus­pects, includ­ing for­mer SS unit com­man­der Michael Karkoc, whom the AP locat­ed last year in Min­neso­ta, could retain ben­e­fits even if removed to anoth­er coun­try.

    Ger­man pros­e­cu­tors opened an inves­ti­ga­tion after the AP uncov­ered doc­u­men­ta­tion show­ing Karkoc, 95, ordered his unit to raze a Pol­ish vil­lage dur­ing the war. Dozens of women and chil­dren were killed in the attack.

    ___

    The Amer­i­can pub­lic did not become ful­ly aware until the mid-1970s that thou­sands of Nazi per­se­cu­tors had immi­grat­ed to the U.S. after World War II, with esti­mates rang­ing as high as 10,000. They were shocked to learn their for­mer ene­mies could be liv­ing next door.

    Con­gres­sion­al pres­sure led to the cre­ation of the OSI in 1979 and it had a sin­gle pur­pose: track down and expel Nazis who played a role in the per­se­cu­tion of civil­ians.

    But because their crimes were com­mit­ted out­side the U.S. and almost always against non-Amer­i­cans, Nazi sus­pects could not be tried in U.S. courts.

    The only oth­er option avail­able was to prove they lied to immi­gra­tion author­i­ties about what they did dur­ing the war, to strip them of their cit­i­zen­ships through a lengthy legal process, and then to attempt either depor­ta­tion or extra­di­tion.

    But almost no coun­tries were will­ing to accept them through depor­ta­tion, and few pressed charges that would have forced extra­di­tion.

    So the Jus­tice Depart­ment devised a strat­e­gy to over­come these dif­fi­cul­ties, includ­ing encour­ag­ing them to leave vol­un­tar­i­ly, which meant they would avoid the messy process of depor­ta­tion but keep their retire­ment ben­e­fits.

    The OSI reg­u­lar­ly trum­pet­ed its suc­cess­es, and boast­ed in 2006 that its work had led to more Nazi expul­sions from the U.S. in the pre­vi­ous 25 years than all oth­er coun­tries in the world com­bined.

    “We real­ly did want peo­ple to give up and go,” said a senior Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial, who defend­ed the prac­tice as a way of avoid­ing depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings that could last as long as 10 years.

    “The goal is still to remove these peo­ple as quick­ly as pos­si­ble, and the fact that as soon as we move to the depor­ta­tion stage they run the risk of los­ing their benefit(s) is still an encour­age­ment to leave,” said the offi­cial, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because he was not autho­rized to speak pub­licly about the depart­men­t’s think­ing on the mat­ter.

    The OSI even went so far as to encour­age sev­er­al sus­pects to use U.S. pass­ports for legal trav­el to allied coun­tries, such as Ger­many or Aus­tria. Once there, they would renounce their U.S. cit­i­zen­ships and still be able to col­lect Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits. This prac­tice became known as “Nazi dump­ing” with­in diplo­mat­ic cir­cles and stoked out­rage at the State Depart­ment and in cap­i­tals in Europe.

    The path for the OSI’s approach opened when Con­gress passed leg­is­la­tion mak­ing “par­tic­i­pa­tion in Nazi per­se­cu­tion” grounds for depor­ta­tion. But the Social Secu­ri­ty Act was not changed to make such crimes also grounds for the ter­mi­na­tion of ben­e­fits.

    An inter­nal memo draft­ed in 1984 by State Depart­ment offi­cials dis­cussed how deals were made behind the scenes. To get sus­pects to renounce cit­i­zen­ship, the OSI would delay legal action and “refrain from seek­ing in any way to lim­it the sub­jec­t’s receipt of U.S. Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits,” the memo said.

    The crit­i­cism trig­gered a bit­ter back-and-forth between the two agen­cies, with each accus­ing the oth­er of being un-Amer­i­can. Decades lat­er, the acri­mo­ny lingers.

    “It was not upfront, it was not trans­par­ent, it was not a legit­i­mate process,” said James Her­gen, a for­mer State Depart­ment legal advis­er who once described the OSI’s approach as a “cyn­i­cal pub­lic­i­ty ploy.” ”This was not the way Amer­i­ca should behave. We should not be dump­ing our refuse, for lack of a bet­ter word, on friend­ly states.”

    Neal Sher, who was OSI’s direc­tor from 1983 to 1994, said the State Depart­ment put a high­er pri­or­i­ty on diplo­mat­ic niceties than hold­ing for­mer mem­bers of Adolf Hitler’s war machine account­able.

    “State always wraps itself in the flag. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s not the Amer­i­can flag,” said Sher, recall­ing a com­plaint voiced by a for­mer col­league.

    One of the first instances of “Nazi-dump­ing” involved Rudolph, a cel­e­brat­ed rock­et sci­en­tist, and set off a diplo­mat­ic firestorm.

    Rudolph was brought to the U.S. after the war because of his tech­ni­cal bril­liance. NASA award­ed him a Dis­tin­guished Ser­vice Medal for achieve­ments that includ­ed his cen­tral role in the Apol­lo project that put a man on the moon. Decades lat­er he was accused of “work­ing thou­sands of slave labor­ers to death” in the Nazi fac­to­ry that built the V‑2 rock­et, and he faced the loss of his cit­i­zen­ship and depor­ta­tion.

    Rudolph and Avdzej, anoth­er Nazi war crimes sus­pect, became the first to vol­un­tar­i­ly leave the Unit­ed States under the OSI’s “renun­ci­a­tion pro­gram.” When they arrived in Ger­many in 1984 and for­feit­ed their U.S. cit­i­zen­ships, a furi­ous West Ger­man gov­ern­ment filed a for­mal protest.

    Amid State Depart­ment objec­tions, the OSI came up with a “new scheme,” said an inter­nal memo, obtained by the AP, to then-Sec­re­tary of State George Shultz. The dif­fi­cul­ty in find­ing coop­er­a­tive coun­tries, accord­ing to the May 1987 memo writ­ten by senior State Depart­ment offi­cials, “has led OSI to resort to bar­gains with Nazi per­se­cu­tors which per­mit their vol­un­tary depar­ture from the U.S.”

    Anoth­er diplo­mat­ic uproar ensued when Aus­tri­an author­i­ties learned about a deal with Mar­tin Bartesch, a for­mer SS guard at the Mau­thausen con­cen­tra­tion camp in Aus­tria. Pris­on­ers were forced to work at Mau­thausen as slave labor­ers. At least 95,000 died from gun­fire, gassings or star­va­tion.

    Unlike most guards against whom lit­tle incrim­i­nat­ing evi­dence sur­vived, cap­tured Nazi records used by Amer­i­can pros­e­cu­tors showed that Bartesch shot and killed a French Jew at the camp in 1943. Bartesch’s fam­i­ly denied he had done any­thing wrong at Mau­thausen.

    In 1987, Bartesch land­ed, unan­nounced, at the air­port in Vien­na. Two days lat­er, under the terms of the deal, his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship was revoked.

    The Roman­ian-born Bartesch, who had immi­grat­ed to the U.S. in 1955, was sud­den­ly state­less — and Aus­tri­a’s prob­lem. The fall­out forced U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al Edwin Meese to apol­o­gize to the Aus­tri­an inte­ri­or min­is­ter and assure him Aus­tria would not be blind­sided again.

    Bartesch received Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits in Aus­tria until he died in 1989.

    The State Depart­ment con­tin­ued to protest the arrange­ment, but to no avail.

    “Every­body knew there was no prof­it in oppos­ing it. It was pro­fes­sion­al sui­cide,” remem­bered Her­gen. “Why would the White House want to be tagged with stop­ping the depor­ta­tion of these Nazi mon­sters? You were the dev­il if you opposed it.”

    The year before Bartesch died, Con­gress amend­ed U.S. law so that indi­vid­u­als deport­ed for aid­ing in the Nazi per­se­cu­tion also would lose their Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits. But if a Nazi sus­pect left before a final depor­ta­tion order was issued, the ben­e­fits could con­tin­ue.

    ____

    The Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion in 1997 began inter­nal dis­cus­sions over whether to ter­mi­nate ben­e­fits to Nazi sus­pects when they were stripped of their cit­i­zen­ship, which is called denat­u­ral­iza­tion, instead of when they were deport­ed. That would have low­ered the thresh­old for ter­mi­nat­ing a sus­pec­t’s ben­e­fits.

    The act­ing com­mis­sion­er of the Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion at the time, John Calla­han, ini­ti­at­ed the debate. “Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits can­not, and should not, be used as a bar­gain­ing tool,” Calla­han wrote in an April 1997 memo to Clin­ton’s domes­tic pol­i­cy chief.

    Calla­han did not respond to the AP’s requests for com­ment.

    Ele­na Kagan, then a top deputy in the domes­tic pol­i­cy office and now a U.S. Supreme Court jus­tice, seemed unmoved by Calla­han’s plea. “This is a pret­ty snot­ty let­ter,” Kagan jot­ted in the mar­gin of the memo.

    The Jus­tice Depart­ment sup­port­ed the pro­pos­al, albeit tepid­ly, the records show.

    But work­ing behind the scenes, a pair of influ­en­tial Jew­ish groups suc­ceed­ed in get­ting the White House to back down. The World Jew­ish Con­gress and the Amer­i­can Gath­er­ing of Holo­caust Sur­vivors threat­ened to pub­licly accuse the admin­is­tra­tion of being soft on Nazi pros­e­cu­tions if it went for­ward.

    Sher, the for­mer OSI chief, boost­ed the hand the Jew­ish groups were play­ing. After a stint with the pow­er­ful Amer­i­can Israel Pub­lic Affairs Com­mit­tee, he was now rep­re­sent­ing the Amer­i­can Gath­er­ing of Holo­caust Sur­vivors.

    The groups argued clos­ing the loop­hole would result in greater lenien­cy for Nazi sus­pects. Fed­er­al judges hear­ing the denat­u­ral­iza­tion cas­es, they said, would not see per­pe­tra­tors of the Holo­caust before them, but fee­ble old men who were on the verge of not only los­ing their cit­i­zen­ships, but their Social Secu­ri­ty too. That would under­cut the pri­ma­ry goal of get­ting sus­pects out of the U.S. and to coun­tries will­ing to pros­e­cute them.

    Inside the Clin­ton White House, senior aides found this log­ic hard to grasp. But it was a fight they did not want.

    The argu­ments for pre­serv­ing the loop­hole do “not sound ful­ly com­pelling, EXCEPT that it is impos­si­ble to ignore who is rais­ing the con­cern,” a White House staffer wrote in a memo to Kagan. The groups promised to “protest vocif­er­ous­ly,” it added. The pro­pos­al was shelved.

    Two years lat­er, in 1999, U.S. Rep. Bob Franks, a Repub­li­can from New Jer­sey, intro­duced leg­is­la­tion to cut off ben­e­fits for any Nazi per­se­cu­tor who left the coun­try vol­un­tar­i­ly, whether they were U.S. cit­i­zens or not.

    This time, the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s stance was unequiv­o­cal. The bill, it said, would under­cut the OSI’s mis­sion.

    Sher defend­ed the depart­men­t’s stance. Six years to 10 years in lit­i­ga­tion costs could be saved if sus­pects left vol­un­tar­i­ly, he said. Dur­ing that time, they would con­tin­ue to receive retire­ment ben­e­fits as well as Medicare, Sher said.

    Not all Jew­ish groups favored keep­ing the loop­hole.

    Rab­bi Mar­vin Hier, who still heads the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter he found­ed in 1977, want­ed it shut. There was “no will” in Europe to pros­e­cute Nazi sus­pects, he said, and the ben­e­fits they col­lect­ed allowed them to live in rel­a­tive com­fort.

    “Some­one receiv­ing an Amer­i­can pen­sion could live very well in Europe or wher­ev­er they set­tled,” Hier said. “We, in effect, were reward­ing them. It did­n’t make any sense.”

    Despite attract­ing near­ly 50 co-spon­sors, the Franks bill failed to pass after run­ning into oppo­si­tion sim­i­lar to what the Clin­ton White House faced. Franks died in 2010.

    U.S. Rep. Car­olyn Mal­oney of New York, a senior Demo­c­rat on the House Over­sight and Gov­ern­ment Reform Com­mit­tee, said in an AP inter­view she plans to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion to close the loop­hole.

    “It’s absolute­ly out­ra­geous that Nazi war crim­i­nals are con­tin­u­ing to receive Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits when they have been out­lawed from our coun­try for many, many, many years,” said Mal­oney, a co-spon­sor of the Franks leg­is­la­tion.

    _____

    Many of the for­mer Nazis who came to the U.S. after World War II blend­ed in just as Hart­mann and Den­zinger did. They worked, raised their fam­i­lies, paid their tax­es. They said lit­tle about what they did dur­ing the war.

    Amer­i­can immi­gra­tion law barred entry to mem­bers of Hitler’s Nazi par­ty, the fanat­i­cal SS units, and any­one else tied to a group con­sid­ered hos­tile to the U.S. The rules were amend­ed in the ear­ly 1950s. The list of banned orga­ni­za­tions was dropped and the focus shift­ed to keep­ing out indi­vid­u­als who “per­son­al­ly advo­cat­ed or assist­ed in the per­se­cu­tion of any per­son or group of per­sons because of race, reli­gion or nation­al ori­gin.”

    The SS units respon­si­ble for guard­ing the Nazi death and con­cen­tra­tion camps were called Totenkopf, or Death’s Head, and their troops wore a sil­ver skull-and-cross­bones on their uni­form col­lars. They were still gen­er­al­ly refused entry after the change. But oth­er SS mem­bers des­ig­nat­ed pri­mar­i­ly for com­bat roles were more like­ly to be let in.

    Many got around the restric­tions by sim­ply lying about their ser­vice in the SS, only to be found decades lat­er by OSI. Oth­ers such as Rudolph, whose skills as a rock­et sci­en­tist trumped what offi­cials knew about his back­ground, were inten­tion­al­ly allowed in.

    In addi­tion to Den­zinger and Hart­mann, Peter Mueller, 90, a for­mer guard at the Natzweil­er camp in France, lives in a nurs­ing home in Worms, Ger­many. Wasyl Lytwyn, 93, who served in the SS Trawni­ki unit that took part in the destruc­tion of the Jew­ish ghet­to in War­saw, is believed to be liv­ing in Ukraine.

    Lytwyn’s 1995 set­tle­ment agree­ment stip­u­lates that his Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits would not be affect­ed by leav­ing. Mueller would have been eli­gi­ble for ben­e­fits based on the cir­cum­stances of his depar­ture, but the Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion would nei­ther con­firm nor deny whether he was receiv­ing pay­ments.

    Hart­mann, the for­mer Nazi SS guard liv­ing in Berlin, vol­un­teered for the SS in 1943 and was assigned to the Death’s Head unit guard­ing Sach­sen­hausen, a con­cen­tra­tion camp on the out­skirts of the Nazi cap­i­tal.

    Pris­on­ers at Sach­sen­hausen were forced into slave labor, tor­tured and sub­ject­ed to hor­rif­ic med­ical exper­i­ments that includ­ed ster­il­iza­tions, cas­tra­tions and inject­ing infec­tious mate­r­i­al into a pris­on­er’s body, accord­ing to the U.S. Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um. An esti­mat­ed 30,000 pris­on­ers died of star­va­tion, dis­ease, exhaus­tion or were mur­dered.

    After the war, Hart­mann, his wife and son first set­tled in Manka­to, Min­neso­ta. The fam­i­ly then moved to Hele­na, Mon­tana, where he worked at the local news­pa­per, The Inde­pen­dent Record, as a type­set­ter. He was grant­ed U.S. cit­i­zen­ship in 1961.

    When the news broke about Hart­mann in 2007, Nathan Gasch, an Auschwitz sur­vivor and Hart­man­n’s neigh­bor in a qui­et Ari­zona retire­ment com­mu­ni­ty called Leisure World, told reporters of an unnerv­ing vis­it to Hart­man­n’s home. There, on the wall, was a pic­ture of Hart­mann dressed in an SS uni­form and wear­ing a Nazi cap. Gasch did not noti­fy the author­i­ties. “I just let it go,” said Gasch, who died last year.

    Hart­mann secured his depar­ture deal in 2007 after reach­ing an agree­ment with the OSI in which he acknowl­edged lying about his Nazi past when he immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States in 1955. As part of a set­tle­ment reached in U.S. Dis­trict Court in Wash­ing­ton, the Roman­ian-born Hart­mann agreed to leave the U.S. at his own expense.

    The court’s rul­ing was based on infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the OSI. But the AP uncov­ered doc­u­ments through a FOIA request to the Nation­al Archives that showed Hart­mann did tell Amer­i­can author­i­ties, when he was apply­ing to immi­grate, about his ser­vice in the SS and as a camp guard at Sach­sen­hausen.

    Carr, the Jus­tice Depart­ment spokesman, did not spec­i­fy in an email Wednes­day whether the doc­u­ments were turned over to Hart­mann. He said Hart­mann admit­ted mak­ing mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions about being at Sach­sen­hausen. Even if he had­n’t, Carr wrote, his cit­i­zen­ship still would be revoked because of the SS con­nec­tion.

    ___

    Den­zinger was born in Cepin, Yugoslavia (now Croa­t­ia), a town out­side Osi­jek with a large pop­u­la­tion of eth­nic Ger­mans. In 1942, at age 18, he began serv­ing in one of the Death’s Head bat­tal­ions.

    His first post­ing was to Mau­thausen, where he trained to be an armed camp guard. He was sub­se­quent­ly sta­tioned in sev­er­al oth­er camps, includ­ing Sach­sen­hausen and the Auschwitz death camp com­plex in occu­pied-Poland where the Holo­caust Muse­um esti­mates near­ly a mil­lion Jews were killed.

    On his immi­gra­tion visa and, lat­er, his appli­ca­tion for U.S. cit­i­zen­ship, Den­zinger omit­ted any ref­er­ences to the SS or death camps, writ­ing only that he served in the Ger­man army.

    His cit­i­zen­ship was revoked by a fed­er­al judge in Novem­ber 1989, a few months after he fled.

    Thomas Den­zinger said his father did not want to put his fam­i­ly through a long and pub­lic legal pro­ceed­ing.

    “He’s made a new life for him­self over there,” he said. “But he’s angry. He claims he was draft­ed into the army and he did as he was told. You do as you are told or they line you up against a wall and shoot you. You don’t have any choice.”

    Croa­t­ian author­i­ties this year opened an inves­ti­ga­tion of Den­zinger’s World War II ser­vice. They would not com­ment on the inquiry while it is ongo­ing.

    In Osi­jek, a town of baroque spires and cob­ble­stone squares, Den­zinger occu­pies the entire sec­ond floor of his river­front build­ing, and has a live-in helper to attend to his needs.

    He spends tran­quil days gaz­ing out at the mari­na from his spa­cious apart­ment, and has a rou­tine of river­side strolls and turkey cut­lets and Cokes at his favorite Ital­ian restau­rant, where he’s known as a gen­er­ous tip­per.

    And the for­mer Auschwitz guard has metic­u­lous­ly chore­o­graphed anoth­er depar­ture.

    His grave­stone — includ­ing a pho­to­graph of him­self wear­ing a suit and tie — is already in place in Cepin’s Catholic Ceme­tery about 10 kilo­me­ters (6 miles) from his apart­ment.

    The black mar­ble slab is pol­ished to a high gloss in the third row of the ceme­tery, not far from the chapel. It is engraved with an epi­taph from his “loved ones”: “Proud that we had you; hap­py that we were with you; eter­nal­ly sad that we lost you.”

    Posted by Vanfield | October 20, 2014, 8:43 am

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