America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (10 page)

[
32
] The classified file room of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Information Management Center contains records of their Harriman investigation. State had discovered that the Harrimans were illegally funneling gold bullion to the Bolsheviks. The investigation was inexplicably terminated. Coincidentally, a large part of the Czar’s art collection at the Hermitage disappeared. This may have been the origin of the fabulous Thyssen art collection in their museum in Spain. Art, after all, makes good collateral for bank loans.

[
33
] As discussed, newly declassified documents in the US National Archives make a compelling case that Harriman continued to deal with the Silesian Corporation even after the Nazi occupation of Poland. Contrary to his denials, Harriman’s secretary recorded that he continued to exercise his vote by proxy all through the war. These incredibly incriminating records will be publicly posted on the website for Ms. Ragge’s new documentary film,
American Secrets
.

[
34
] In fairness, the Robber Barons did not plan to use the Auschwitz site as a mass extermination center. That came later. But the same geographic and rail factors that lead to the selection of Auschwitz-Birkenau as an industrial site, also made it useful as the largest death factory for Jewish slave laborers.

[
35
] However, there is some concern that the film may never see the light of day. The IRS in 2010 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 ever 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).

[
36
] Not that public sourcing always worked. In one case, I pointed out that certain CIA code words appeared in a book available in a public library. Did the CIA want me to surrender my library card, I inquired? Their response was that “if you say it, then people will know its true.” The censorship stayed. The code words referred to Operations REDSOX/REDCAP, part of OPC’s undeclared paramilitary war behind the Iron Curtain.

[
37
] I have always thought that the Dulles brothers, who played a significant role in designing the structure of the defense and intelligence communities in 1947-1948, deliberately used compartmentalization and fragmentation to keep each of the agencies in the dark about their clients’ nefarious foreign investments. At one point, the US Government had twenty two different intelligence services, none of whom shared files with the others.

[
38
] The classified records of the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) are retained in the legislative history section of the Criminal Division Archives at DOJ Headquarters in Washington.

[
39
] That is why I looked for a loophole: all of the Nazis I named in the original edition of this book were dead. The disbarment threat was delivered to me personally by the Criminal Division’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of Internal Security.

[
40
] Several journalists confirmed that the leaks to the press claiming that I was never a federal prosecutor, only a researcher, and that I was under criminal investigation came directly from Allan Ryan, the Director of the Office of Special Investigations.

[
41
] The CIA did know that there was a war criminal named Lebed, they just did not know his first name.

[
42
] 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 1990s 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.

[
43
] Confidential sources inside OSI told me that after reading the manuscript, Sullivan and Ryan had assigned a team of OSI researchers to comb through it to find anything to discredit it. They could only find two name misspellings (Ryan’s and Rockler’s) and three typos. Ryan passed the information to Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times, who included it in his otherwise quite favorable book review.

[
44
]Prof. Burds did not want to hurt my feelings, but immediately sent an email informing me that Director Rosenbaum spent most of their meeting attacking me. When I confronted Rosenbaum, who I thought was a friend, he denied ever saying anything to disparage me. Mark Aarons, my co-author on several books, wrote back to Rosenbaum that he believed Professor Burds because Rosenbaum had tried the same smear tactics with him over twenty years earlier.

[
45
] The last time I communicated with Rosenbaum, he admitted that he still had not looked at the Sunrise files. To this day, no one in the Justice Department has ever looked inside their own classified visa files, despite the fact that it is the single most likely source to locate Nazis who were brought into the United States to work for OPC.

[
46
] Just prior to the
60 Minutes
show, OSI Director Ryan told the producer that I had sent my Top Secret report to the Attorney General behind his back, and that he, Ryan, had never read it. I asked the producer to meet me in Congressman Barney Frank’s office. There in the Judiciary Committee files was the original draft manuscript with extensive reviews and amendments in Ryan’s own handwriting. Ryan had even taken my name off the report and sent it up to the Attorney General under his own name. Word got around quickly in the press that Ryan had been caught in an outright lie and was not to be trusted.

Ryan was later criticized in an appellate court opinion (probably unfairly) for what appeared to be fraudulent conduct in withholding documents from the defense. My own best guess is that Ryan was merely negligent and may have been manipulated by the far more culpable Sullivan, who was best man at Ryan’s wedding, and godfather to his child.

[
47
] In researching the book, my coauthor’s colleague Pierre Vicary interviewed several surviving Croatian Catholic priests who bragged into his microphone about how they had rescued the fugitive Nazis for the Vatican. In a sense, the priests defeated the American censors by declassifying the story themselves.

Prisoners work in the Siemens factory at Bobrek, a sub-camp of Auschwitz

Preface

I never wanted to be a Nazi hunter when I grew up. Like most kids from the Irish Catholic neighborhoods of Boston, I knew little about the Holocaust and less about covert operations. They didn’t teach those subjects at Boston Latin, Boston College or at law school. Quite frankly, I couldn’t have cared less. When President Jimmy Carter asked the Justice Department in 1979 to set up an Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to see if there were any Nazis hiding in America, I thought it was a joke. Like most federal attorneys working in Washington, I thought that a Nazi war crimes investigation would be a bit dated. Why re-open criminal cases against seventy-year-old men for crimes that had taken place outside the United States decades before?

I applied to join OSI for purely selfish motives. I thought having a background as a Nazi war crimes prosecutor might look good on my resumé, and I thought I might get a free trip to Germany out of it. Instead, I got a trip to Suitland, Maryland. When I joined OSI, my new boss discovered that I had some slight background in military intelligence as a former Army officer. Despite the fact that military intelligence is often regarded as a contradiction in terms, I was the first person in forty years to review the classified archives of U.S. intelligence. My job was to look in the old files for leads on any Nazis hiding in America.

I found more than I bargained for when I went to the archives in Suitland, a little town just outside Washington, D.C. That’s where the Government’s secrets are buried, literally. There are twenty vaults underground; each vault is one acre in size, crammed floor to ceiling with classified files. Do you remember the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark? That’s what the vaults in Suitland are like, only not as organized. No one has the faintest idea what’s down there. America had twenty-two different intelligence organizations after World War II, and the people who put the files away have long since retired.

I spent the better part of two years studying top-secret files in Suitland, and other archives like it. To tell the truth, I just got lost. One day I was stumbling around in the vault where the nuclear warfare secrets are stored when I came across a collection of Nazi records. It was just luck–whether good or bad, I am still not sure. I opened a sealed envelope of information on government confidential informants that I wasn’t supposed to see, that no one was supposed to see until the year 2015. There were war criminals in America, all right. The Nazis I had been assigned to prosecute had been brought in by the U.S. State Department. That wasn’t all I found.

I always had an Eagle Scout’s view of America, and what I found in the vaults stunned me. Here were the secret records of the Holocaust. Beginning in September 1941, U.S. intelligence was receiving accurate weekly totals of the number of Jews being killed. The reports were corroborated by the Polish underground and British intelligence. There were even aerial photographs of the early extermination sites.

Except for President Roosevelt, none of the allies wanted to do anything about the Jews while the war was going on. Stalin didn’t care how many boxcars Hitler was wasting on the Jews, as long as the trains weren’t carrying more troops and ammunition to the Eastern front. The British did not want a flood of Jewish refugees going to Palestine in the middle of the war and upsetting British-Arab oil relationships.

President Roosevelt knew that his own Congress would not change the laws to let Jewish refugees into America. Congressional immigration quotas had already turned several boatloads of Jews back to Nazi Germany. It wasn’t just Congress. As late as 1941, the Gallup polls showed that a substantial minority of the American public was in favor of still stricter anti-Jewish legislation. The British put it bluntly: it wasn’t a question of Hitler’s unwillingness to let the Jews go, as much as it was Allied reluctance to take them in. If the Allies pressed Hitler too hard to let the Jews out of the concentration camps, he might do it. And then what would the Allies do?

To salve their consciences about the Holocaust, the Allied leaders reluctantly agreed to Roosevelt’s proposal to hold a Nuremberg trial after the war, but in the meantime the Jews were declared expendable to the war effort. Instead of bombing the gas chambers, the Allied bombers flew over Auschwitz while the camp inmates watched in despair. Hundreds of thousands died because the Allies did nothing.