Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Joseph Stalin had no love for Nazi collaborators, whether real or suspected. As a consequence, an estimated two hundred thousand coldblooded Nazi collaborators followed the German army west as the Red Army forced it to retreat, according to German historian Dieter Pohl. After the war, the displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy were bulging with Nazi collaborators.

In effect, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 had a not-so-hidden consequence obvious to anyone who bothered to look for it. More than 70 percent of the refugees eventually admitted under the act (around 280,000) were born in countries occupied or dominated by the Soviet Union. By disproportionately favoring Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Baltic citizens, the bill made it relatively easy for the Nazi collaborators among them to get visas to the United States. The net result? An estimated three to five thousand Nazi collaborators from Iron Curtain countries entered the United States between 1949 and 1953. Some would raise that estimate to as many as ten thousand.

As subsequent chapters will document, the FBI and the CIA welcomed and protected these Nazi collaborators like long-lost relatives. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used them as spies, informants, and anticommunist leaders in their respective émigré communities. And the CIA encouraged and secretly funded their governments-in-exile that were taking root in America.

As members of Congress began slinking home after passing the Displaced Persons Act, President Truman greeted the new bill with anger and disgust. Congress had delivered an embarrassing piece of legislation founded on “abhorrent intolerance” and left him little choice. The clock was ticking on the refugee bomb and Congress was on summer vacation. Convinced that a flawed act was better than no act, Truman signed the bill, then verbally took the Eightieth “Do Nothing Congress” to the woodshed.

“If Congress were still in session,” he said, “I would return this bill without my approval and urge that a fairer, more humane bill be passed. In its present form, this bill is flagrantly discriminatory. It mocks the American tradition of fair play.”

Truman hoped that special-interest opposition to the bill, mostly from Jews and middle European Catholics, would shame lawmakers into approving a series of corrective amendments. With that in mind, he called a special session of Congress a month after passage of the act and laid out an eleven-point legislative agenda. One point asked for an amended Displaced Persons Act that would eliminate the discriminatory regulations.

Congress failed to act for two years.

Finally, in 1950, Congress extended the act for two more years in a new bill that admitted another two hundred thousand refugees, eliminated the anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic “device,” and erased the preference for farmers and Baltic immigrants. By that time, however, more than one hundred thousand Belorussian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian refugees had already entered the country.

The 1950 act charged the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with deporting refugees who had entered the country illegally and/or had become American citizens illegally. Although the act did not specifically exclude former Nazis and Nazi collaborators, it did bar “any person who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, or national origin.” Important for the future case against John Demjanjuk, the act also excluded refugees who lied “to make themselves eligible for admission.”

It sounded simple on paper. The reality was something else. INS investigators had to find the estimated three to five thousand illegal Hiwis hiding in communities across the country, collect incriminating documents from the Soviet Union and its satellites, pierce the Iron Curtain to find and interview eyewitnesses, and persuade the Soviet Union to allow willing witnesses to testify in the United States.

To ensure enforcement of the law, the 1950 act also mandated “thorough” investigations of European visa applicants and written reports about their “character, history and eligibility.” It was a logical first step. Unfortunately, the task of investigating more than six hundred thousand visa applicants landed on the overburdened shoulders of the U.S. Army forces stationed in the American Sector of Berlin. The assignment was more than a logistical nightmare. It was impossible, given the conditions in postwar Germany.

It would be difficult to overestimate the confusion and misery that all but swallowed Germany in the months after the war. The sheer number of homeless and displaced persons was staggering. Besides the millions of German soldiers who had to be screened for Nazi affiliation and the more than two hundred thousand SS officers who had to be investigated for possible war crimes, civilian armies of tramps clogged the roads. Ten million were fleeing the rubble and starvation of bombed cities. Another ten million were concentration camp survivors and former slave laborers from Eastern Europe. Another seven million were Volksdeutsche , mostly from the farmlands of Poland and Ukraine.

Add to this starving, sick, and anxious horde of humanity a German currency that was next to worthless and Western Europe had a problem of gargantuan proportions. Food was more precious than a wedding ring. Virgins could be had for a candy bar. As one German police report described the desperation: “It is impossible to distinguish between good girls and bad girls in Germany. Even nice girls of good families, good education, and fine backgrounds have discovered that their bodies afford the only real living.”

To make displaced-person investigations even more difficult, the U.S. Army in Berlin had few investigative tools. True, it had access to a card index of SS officers, which it had found on the floor of a Munich paper mill waiting to be pulped. But as valuable as the index was, it offered no help in identifying Nazi collaborators who were not members of the SS. Their records were either in filing cabinets behind the Iron Curtain in their countries of origin or in the hands of the Soviet secret police, who had lucked upon a treasure trove of Gestapo records containing documents and files on thousands of Hiwis when the Red Army entered Berlin from the east in the spring of 1945.

To prevent dangerous persons from entering the United States, the Displaced Persons Act created a special Displaced Persons Commission (DPC) with the authority to determine which European organizations were “inimical” to the United States. Members of those organizations would be denied U.S. visas. By 1951, the DPC had developed an official country-by-country “Inimical List” of more than 275 organizations. U.S. officials responsible for screening visa applicants used the list to make eligibility decisions.

One organization defined as criminal by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and as inimical by the DPC was the German Waffen SS (armed SS), whose battalions were made up of mostly non-German volunteers. Besides fighting the Soviet army, Waffen SS volunteers executed Soviet POWs and assisted the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in rounding up, robbing, and killing Jews, Gypsies, and communists.

In September 1950, the DPC made a controversial decision that opened America’s door for a group of Latvian and Estonian Waffen SS who had survived the war. In so doing, the DPC was following the lead of both the Nuremberg tribunal and the U.S. High Commission in Germany. Both bodies had ruled that the 30,000 Estonian and 60,000 Latvian soldiers who had served in the Baltic Legions were conscripts, not volunteers. For that reason, Nuremberg and the High Commission defined them as freedom fighters protecting their homelands from a Soviet invasion and another Soviet communist occupation. As such, they were not true members of the criminal Waffen SS.