Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

In effect, OSI was calling John Loftus either a liar, a conspiracy fruitcake, a greedy headline chaser, or an incompetent investigative attorney—the very same charges INS had leveled at its investigator Anthony DeVito and its prosecutor Vincent Schiano.

American Jewish Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen Jr. joined in the Loftus-bashing frenzy. A respected author who had written extensively about Nazis in America in the monthly magazine Jewish Currents, Allen totally shredded The Belarus Secret in a review article, calling Loftus, in effect, both a fraud and a liar.

The Loftus brouhaha was about more than some faulty footnotes and historical errors. Unlike Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal, Charles Allen, OSI, and others, Loftus attempted to look beyond the trees in order to see the forest. He didn’t ask: Is this particular man or woman a former Nazi collaborator? Instead he asked: Did the United States have a policy to recruit Nazi collaborators and bring them to America? If so, who was responsible for the policy? Who was responsible for its implementation? And how widespread was it?

Loftus answered those overlapping questions in The Belarus Secret as follows: Yes, there was an open-door policy for Nazi war criminals. The State Department was the major bad guy. And the policy was so broad that it included “nearly all the puppet regimes established by the Third Reich from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”

Loftus’s conclusions were roundly denounced as either false or unsupported. But the intensity of the brawl over his serious allegations raised two cynical questions. Did Washington go after John Loftus, not because he was wrong, but because it wanted to protect a secret? And was OSI publicly rejecting Loftus’s work in the hope that the CIA would not use his exposé, which was based on classified documents, as an excuse not to cooperate in ongoing and future OSI investigations?

Since the publication of Loftus’s decidedly flawed The Belarus Secret thirty years ago, the government has declassified millions of pages of secret and top-secret military, White House, CIA, State Department, and FBI documents; historian John Lewis Gaddis published his much-anticipated biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life; Belorussian historian Leonid Rein published The Kings and the Pawns, a critical analysis of Belorussia’s collaboration with the Nazis; World War II historian Timothy Snyder published The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus; and historical journalist Christopher Simpson published Blowback, a groundbreaking book on America’s use of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators.

These new documents and books show that what Loftus wrote about Emanuel Jasiuk was accurate. They also shed critical light on Loftus’s allegations against the State Department and clarify the lines of responsibility for America’s open-door policy for Nazi war criminals. In sum, they prove that Loftus was much more right than wrong.

Loftus alleged that the Germans prepared for the invasion of Belorussia by recruiting teams of exiled Belorussians to become the backbone of the new Belorussian Nazi puppet government. The allegation is important because it is the foundation for Loftus’s specific charge that the United States brought at least three hundred Belorussian quisling war criminals into the country.

Books devoted specifically to the collaboration of Belorussians with their Nazi occupiers during World War II are rare in the West. Historian Leonid Rein’s 2011 work, The Kings and the Pawns, is a welcome exception. A Belorussian who received his doctorate at the University of Haifa, Rein is a research fellow at the Yad Vashem Holocaust center in Jerusalem. His highly documented, award-winning work supports Lotfus’s first Belarus allegation.

According to Rein, Belorussian exiles living in Germany and Poland prepared for the Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Those living in Berlin formed a group called “The Center,” whose members were selected to form the leadership of the quisling government after Operation Barbarossa. At the same time, exiles living in Poland helped German military intelligence establish a saboteur training center outside Warsaw. Shaped into teams of up to fifty men, the Belorussian saboteurs were parachuted behind the Soviet lines with instructions to blow up strategic railroads and bridges in preparation for the German invasion.

Also with the help of Belorussian exiles in Germany and Poland, the leaders of Einsatzgruppe B selected Belorussian volunteers to help their 655 Einsatzkommandos identify, round up, rob, and kill Jews. The Germans called their volunteers “trusted people” ( Vertrauensmänner, or V-Leute ).

After the invasion, the Germans formed an estimated thirty thousand, two-men teams (German estimate) and appointed them to the two key positions in local governments throughout Belorussia—mayor and police chief. The teams and their minions made the execution of eight hundred thousand Jews in eighteen months possible. Public support for the genocide was, for the most part, largely irrelevant to the success of the operation.

Belorussian Boris Grushevsky witnessed the brutality of the police in the town of Stolpce: “The policemen were sitting on the top of this pit. They had submachine guns. There were also several Germans. It was the policemen who shot. The Jews were standing in columns in front of the pit…. The Jews were made to take off their clothes and approach the pit, a few at a time, and enter it. They lay down and were shot…. Some of the Jews were only wounded and tried to get up. Blood was gushing from their wounds.”

In screening potential team members, the Germans looked for volunteers who were anticommunist, not Jewish, and preferably not Polish. Administrative skills or experience were not factors. The tasks assigned to the teams were to control the local population, keep peace and order, supply the Germans with food and goods on demand, and help exterminate Jews. As Rein concluded, the quisling mayors and police chiefs played “a prominent role in the persecution of Belorussian Jews—especially their ghettoization—and in the requisition and disposal of murdered Jews’ property.”

The Germans eventually installed a mostly symbolic national puppet government with a president and cabinet. “The Germans made it clear,” Rein wrote, “[that] their duty was solely to help weed out ‘the enemies of the state.’”

Loftus had reached a broad, sweeping conclusion about Belorussian collaboration in the Holocaust: that no other country in Eastern Europe matched Belorussia in its willingness to assist the Nazis in exterminating Jews and in the barbarity of its collaborators. Rein agrees with part of Loftus’s conclusion. “In most cases,” he wrote, “local [Belorussian] policemen participated enthusiastically in the massacres, displaying a measure of cruelty that the Germans themselves often found repulsive.” But he rejects the rest of Loftus’s conclusion that Belorussia stood out as the worst Holocaust collaborator in Eastern Europe. Rein suggests that Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine were just as enthusiastic and cruel as Belorussia in helping Nazi Einsatzgruppen identify, ghettoize, rob, and murder Jews—a charge even more damning than Loftus’s.

The most important allegation Loftus made was that the United States had formally adopted an open-door policy for former Nazi war criminals and that the Department of State was mostly responsible for the policy. Military, State Department, and National Security Council documents declassified since the publication of The Belarus Secret prove that indeed there was an open-door policy by virtue of nonexclusion—that is, the U.S government did not explicitly forbid its agencies from using Nazi war criminals. The declassified documents spell out in detail who crafted the incremental policy and when. It began with a very long telegram.