Alex Constantine - December 22, 2014
The US made many former Nazis welcome – but this study doesn’t ask ethical questions
Book Title: The Nazis Next Door
Author: Eric Lichtblau
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
In 1955 a native of the Circassian region of the USSR migrated to the United States. Tscherim Soobzokov settled in Paterson, New Jersey, where he became a US citizen in 1961. Nearly two decades later, in 1979, federal prosecutors sought to strip the naturalised American of his citizenship and deport him from the country.
Earlier that year the US justice department created a new unit: the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Its remit was special indeed: to prosecute Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the US.
In the immediate aftermath of the second World War, American prosecutors had tried and convicted hundreds of Nazis for war crimes before US military courts in occupied Germany. Now the OSI would be dealing with Nazis who had left their homeland for the comforts of the US.
Because domestic federal courts lacked jurisdiction over crimes committed overseas, the OSI was limited to bringing civil immigration charges: Hitler’s henchmen would be charged with lying on their immigration forms. Officials would have the power to strip ageing Nazis of their wrongfully acquired citizenship and deport them to a country that could prosecute them.
Tscherim Soobzokov looked like an inviting target for the fledgling OSI. Investigators had learned that he had served as an officer in the SS and allegedly participated in the roundup and mass killing of Jews.
The OSI dutifully filed charges against Soobzokov, only to encounter a rude surprise. In a sworn deposition, Soobzokov didn’t deny his service in the SS; rather, he insisted that American authorities had known about his wartime activities as early as 1954 – because he had told them.
OSI investigators dismissed the claim as an outlandish lie, until they contacted their colleagues in the CIA. Soobzokov was telling the truth. Worse still, the former SS officer had served as a spy for the CIA in the 1950s and later as an informant for the FBI. Appalled federal prosecutors had no choice but to quietly drop the case.
Outrageous tales
The Nazis Next Door is filled with such outrageous tales. Its author, Eric Lichtblau, a reporter with the New York Times, received a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, a study of how the George W Bush administration came to dispense with such niceties as the rule of law in aggressively prosecuting the “war on terror”. Common to both books is Lichtblau’s passionate interest in documenting how Washington’s obsession with perceived threats from abroad has led to treacherous moral compromises at home.
In Bush’s Law, the threat came in the form of al-Qaeda and its loose affiliation of operatives; in The Nazis Next Door, menace came in the form of the Soviet Union. Writing in 1947, an American military analyst soberly noted: “Nazism should no longer be considered a serious consideration from a viewpoint of national security when the far greater threat of communism is now jeopardising the entire world.”The policy implications of this position were clear. “We will pick up any man who will help us defeat the Soviets,” wrote a CIA official, “no matter what his Nazi record was.” And so, months removed from fighting to liberate Europe and while still prosecuting Hitler’s minions before occupation courts, the US began recruiting Nazis and easing their passage into the country.By Lichtblau’s reckoning, as many as 10,000 former Nazis and collaborators settled in the US. These included 1,600 physicists, chemists, engineers and doctors transplanted as part of Operation Paperclip, the audacious project designed to put top Nazi scientists to work for the US.The most famous of these was Wernher von Braun, chief designer of both the V2 rocket, which rained terror on London, and the Saturn V, which lifted American astronauts to the moon.Another renowned Paperclip scientist was Hubertus Strughold, “the living sage of space medicine”, who had overseen horrific experiments on concentration-camp inmates.However unsavoury their pasts, these scientists were welcomed and feted by the US – provided they could help develop ballistic missiles and high-altitude bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union.US spy agencies made equally generous use of Nazis, recruiting perhaps 1,000 former acolytes of Hitler to help gather intelligence on the Soviets. These included small fish, such as Soobzokov, but also such prominences as the SS general Karl Wolff, Himmler’s former chief of staff, and Otto von Bolschwing, an SS officer who had worked closely with Adolf Eichmann on the Nazis’ “Jewish policies”.In the cool reckoning of Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, and in the hysterical imaginings of J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, even the most tainted Nazi could be enlisted in the fight against the red menace.Thousands of other Nazi collaborators entered the US by simply lying on their immigration forms. Even here, however, cold-war politics played a decisive role.
The Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which in theory relaxed American immigration law in response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Europe, essentially turned its back on victims of Hitler and extended its welcome to victims of Stalin. The law reserved tens of thousands of precious immigration spots for Ukrainians, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, as well as the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans expelled from their homelands by the Soviets. Collaborators, healthily represented in these immigrant groups, flocked to the US because Congress had extended a warm invitation.
American anti-Semites
Lichtblau tells this story of unseemly patronage and moral accommodation, providing a highly readable account edged with a justified tone of indignation. He does a particularly nice job of showing that many of those most willing to climb into bed with former Nazis were themselves closeted – or not-so-closeted – anti-Semites. (The belief that all Jews were communists was, of course, one of Hitler’s pet canards.)
And yet The Nazis Next Door is not without its shortcomings. As a book of popular history it is more a work of helpful synthesis than original sleuthing. As Lichtblau acknowledges, the book relies heavily on earlier treatments, in particular Judith Feigin’s exhaustive internal history of the OSI and US Intelligence and the Nazis, a compendious work prepared by leading scholars. His claim, for example, that 10,000 Nazis and collaborators settled in the US is hardly new; a former head of the OSI made the same guesstimate decades earlier.
More disappointing is Lichtblau’s refusal to address the deeper question: were any of these compromises justified? In discussing the CIA’s recruitment of Soobzokov, Wolff and von Bolschwing, he emphasises not only that all three were deeply tainted figures but also that they ultimately proved of little value to the US. (Soobzokov comes off as a particularly inept spy.)
Von Braun represents a very different case. Disagreeable as it may be to celebrate a scientist who presided over a Nazi rocket factory ruthlessly run on slave labour, there is no gainsaying von Braun’s contributions to the American military and civilian rocket programme. Was the US right, then, in putting von Braun to work?
In sidestepping the difficult ethical problems that his own book raises, Lichtblau misses an opportunity to weigh in on a matter that now vexes debates about Islamic State: in the fight against intractable enemies, to whom should we be prepared to turn for help? Lawrence Douglas is the author of The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and theLast Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, to be published next year. He teaches at Amherst College in Mas
MAN ACCUSED OF NAZI PAST INJURED BY BOMB IN JERSEY
By Ralph Blumenthal
New York Times, August 16, 1985, Section B, Page 2
A man once accused by the Justice Department of concealing his wartime membership in the Waffen SS was critically injured early yesterday when a pipe bomb exploded at his home in Paterson, N.J.
The victim, Tscherim Soobzokov, 61 years old, contested the accusations, which were withdrawn in 1980 after he produced records showing that he had properly described his activities to the immigration authorities.
The blast occurred at 4:29 A.M. when Mr. Soobzokov was called outside by a neighbor who found Mr. Soobzokov's car on fire in the street, Federal and police investigators said.
Mr. Soobzokov was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Paterson, and hospital officials said last night that he had lost the lower portion of his right leg and was in critical condition after the completion of about nine hours of surgery.
Family Members Injured
His wife, daughter and grandson suffered minor injuries, the police said.
The attack was applauded as ''a righteous act'' by a leader of a militant Jewish group who had recently denounced Mr. Soobzokov. But the leader, Mordechai Levy of the Jewish Defense Organization, said in a telephone interview that none of the group's members had been responsible for the bombing.
Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms joined the Paterson Police Department, Passaic County Prosecutor and New Jersey State Police in investigating the attack.
Michael McDonnell, a spokesman for the Newark office of the F.B.I., said investigators were trying to determine what type of explosive had been used and whether the bomb had been attached to the door of the house or set off by a timer or fuse or by remote control.
He said the F.B.I. had been notified of recent threats against Mr. Soobzokov.
In December 1979, the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations charged Mr. Soobzokov with having falsified the record of his wartime activities in order to enter the United States as an immigrant in 1955.
The agency said that Mr. Soobzokov had belonged to a Waffen SS unit and served as a member of the German Army's North Caucasian Legion and a Nazi-run police unit during World War II. It contended that he had sought to conceal this record and the agency moved to revoke his citizenship in order to seek his deportation.
In July 1980, however, the special investigations unit withdrew the charge after officials of that agency said Mr. Soobzokov had showed them a document proving he had disclosed his wartime record when he applied for a visa at the United States Embassy in Amman, Jordan, in 1952.
The Central Intelligence Agency later said it had found a copy of the document in its files. Allan A. Ryan Jr., then director of the special investigations unit, said at the time that the C.I.A. had not told him of the document when the case was being prepared.
Neal M. Sher, director of the office of special investigations, said last night that in the document Mr. Soobzokov had acknowledged membership in the Waffen SS, the military arm of the SS, the Nazi elite guard.
Prominent in Politics
Mr. Soobzokov, who became a citizen in 1961, served for many years as Passaic County's chief purchasing officer and was prominent in Democratic Party politics. His parents were Circassian farmers in an Islamic area of the Soviet Union between the Black and Caspian Seas and he has been a leader of the Circassian community in Passaic County.
According to Lieut. John Ragucci of the Paterson Police Department, a man passing Mr. Soobzokov's house at 704 14th Street shortly after 4 A.M. saw a parked car on fire outside the house.
He alerted a neighbor who recognized the car, a late-model Buick, as Mr. Soobzokov's. The neighbor banged on Mr. Soobzokov's door, awakening him. As Mr. Soobzokov came through the door, the lieutenant said, the bomb went off. The neighbor suffered minor injuries. Her name was not released.
Mr. Soobzokov's wife, Hoshnasho, 59; his daughter, Susan Said, 29, and her son, Caspar, 4, were also slightly injured walking on broken glass, Lieutenant Ragucci said.
The Soobzokovs have an unlisted telephone number and hospital officials said the family declined to make any statement.
Mr. Levy of the Jewish Defense Organization said he had denounced Mr. Soobzokov in a talk Aug. 7 before about 45 people at a nearby synagogue, Young Israel of Passaic. He also said his group - which he described as a more militant offshoot of the Jewish Defense League - had been planning demonstrations outside Mr. Soobzokov's home.
''The only thing I regret is that he is still alive,'' Mr. Levy said. ''Whoever did it did a righteous act.'' Asked whether any of his members were responsible, he replied, ''As far as I know, none.''
Rabbi Meir Kahane, member of the Israeli Knesset, said of the incident: ''I can only cheerfully applaud such action.''
Rabbi Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, spoke after his arrival in the United States yesterday