America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (11 page)

Things did not improve much after the war. The Attorney General sent President Truman a top-secret memo explaining that Congress had refused to pass the Displaced Persons Act because “it would let too many Jews into America.” The Justice Department drafted a cleverly disguised anti-Jewish quota and convinced Truman to sign the new law because it represented “the largest number of Jews that Congress was willing to accept.” The State Department’s classified files were worse. They warned President Truman in writing that he must never allow the Jews to have their own country because it would be a “communist puppet state within three years”. I had never realized that there was official anti-Semitism in the government of the United States.

The records that shocked me the most were the Belarus files. The Belarus is a region of Byelorussia (White Russia), occupied by the Nazis during World War II. Many local collaborators worked with the Germans in local administration or in the Belarus SS Division. Let me give an example of one man whose name kept popping up in all the American and NATO classified files on the Belarus.

Stanislaw Stankievich was an educated man, a Doctor of Humanities. As a reward for assisting the Nazis with the invasion of White Russia, Stankievich was appointed to several government posts. His first task was to take his police force of local White Russian volunteers and, without any help from the Germans, massacre all 8,000 Jews in a certain town on a single day. Stankievich had his policemen order the Jews to lie on top of each other in the graves, head to toe. That way, Stankievich could cram more bodies in and his troops could save ammunition by shooting through two layers of people at once. It was a simple system and it was copied all over the Belarus region. The massacres nauseated the Germans because the methods were considered clumsy. There were complaints back to Berlin about wounded Jews crawling out of graves alive.

The worst part of the Belarus atrocities was not discovered until post-war autopsies were conducted. The Red Cross could find no trace of wounds upon the smaller children. Apparently to save the price of a bullet, Stankievich had ordered that the babies should be buried alive. Eichmann’s diary noted that he was revolted by the brutal method of killing in the Belarus region and ordered experiments with poison gas as a more “humane” alternative. It is hard to conceive Auschwitz as a kinder alternative to the Belarus slaughter.

Stankievich and the other White Russian collaborators were greatly rewarded for their efforts by the handful of German occupiers. The leaders of Belarus became the Mayors, Governors, and Cabinet Members of the Nazi puppet government in White Russia. The Germans even allowed the policemen who carried out the massacres the rare “honor” of having their own SS Division, named the Belarus SS. After wiping out over half a million Jews in White Russia, the Belarus Division fought against the Allies in Monte Casino and killed American troops in France. At the end of the war, Stankievich and the other members of Belarus simply disappeared. But their crimes were not forgotten.

A German soldier told the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal what Stankievich had done. His crimes were so hideous that Stankievich is the only non-German whose atrocities were described in full in the U.S. Congressional Record. Stankievich was even denounced by name in the United Nations. The Soviet Delegate to the UN accused the Western Allies of hiding Stankievich and thousands of other war criminals in the Displaced Persons Camps of West Germany after the war. The State Department told the UN that the charges were mere propaganda. President Truman, Congress, and even General Eisenhower had issued the strictest orders that war criminals should be prosecuted wherever they were found. No American officials were protecting war criminals, they said.

I found out that the State Department was lying. They had put Stankievich in charge of a refugee camp in the American Zone of Germany. Not only was Stankievich on the U.S. payroll, he was helping the State Department hand out U.S. immigration visas to his friends in Belarus. The U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps arrested Stankievich and threw him in prison. He promptly confessed in writing to everything he had done for the Nazis. He had nothing to fear. A few hours later, a State Department official arrived to order Stankievich’s release. The Army was told that Stankievich was an important anti-communist organizer working for the British Secret Service.

The Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) secretly burglarized the State Department offices in Stuttgart. They found out that the State Department had set up its own spy service, the “Office of Policy Coordination,” to recruit ex-Nazis for the Cold War. After all, Eastern European collaborators like Stankievich had the most recent experience in fighting the Russians. The genius who thought up the whole program of recruiting fugitive war criminals for an underground guerilla network was a British intelligence officer named Kim Philby. Kim Philby had been recruiting ex-Nazis as British Intelligence agents from the moment the war ended, and was secretly sharing his networks with the State Department.

A few State Department officials, notably Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, fell for Philby’s story, hook, line and sinker. Eastern European Nazis could be hired for an underground army behind Russian lines in the event of World War III. These men weren’t really Nazis, Philby assured them. They only fought with the Germans because they hated the Russians more. Men like Stankievich were really anti-communist freedom fighters. The CIA never fell for Philby’s story, but a lot of people inside State Department intelligence did.

Behind the back of the U.S. Government, these mutinous American bureaucrats were helping Philby smuggle Nazis into America, to be trained for Cold War espionage. Philby’s Nazis were shipped to Canada, Australia, and South America as well, posing as anti-communist freedom fighters. There was only one little problem: Kim Philby was a communist double agent. Throughout World War II, the Soviets had infiltrated their own spies into every group of Eastern European Nazis. After the war was over, Moscow ordered Philby to recycle the same communist agents, posing as ex-Nazi “freedom fighters,” into every Western country that was gullible enough to take them in.

As a result, the Cold War was a disaster. Philby’s Nazis had a pipeline into Russia all right, but the pipeline leaked in both directions. Every U.S. intelligence network was betrayed. By the time Philby showed up at a press conference in Moscow, the West had lost virtually its entire espionage apparatus behind the Iron Curtain. Philby’s eastern European Nazi networks had been thoroughly riddled with communist intelligence agents who had posed as Nazis during WWII. These double agents were a significant asset to Russian intelligence during wartime, and it was Philby who convinced the Dulles brothers to hire the same mole-ridden networks during the cold war. His success is best measured by the CIA’s casualty rate in sending agents behind the Iron Curtain: 98% fatality

The extent of the tragedy was censored out of this book at the time it was first published. During the Eisenhower administration, the embarrassed bureaucrats buried the files in the vaults. OPC’s agents cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Eastern Europeans who wanted to join America in the fight for freedom. They sacrificed their lives as part of the effort to hide the Robber Baron’s financial collaboration with the Nazis under a shroud of national security. Not even the CIA knew what Dulles and Wisner had really done.

The cover-up was the only thing they did well, but Dulles and Wisner had a lot of help. Nelson Rockefeller and Vice President Nixon had supervised these private covert operations so that President Eisenhower could claim “plausible deniability.” I had stumbled across the records of major British and American corporations that had made a profit on both sides of World War II, and had helped Dulles and Wisner launder federal money through private foundations to ex-Nazi “Freedom Fighters” during the Cold War. The names of the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations as money launderers for OPC were also censored from the original manuscript. Even the Vatican had been pressured into playing along with the anti-communist crusade by smuggling Nazis out of Italy for Allied intelligence purposes. In return, the Vatican was paid off with secret ownership of Italian insurance companies whose Jewish investors were no longer around to claim the assets.

It was a sickening scandal. My first reaction was to get out of the vaults and forget what I had seen, just go back to my nice safe career as a Justice Department lawyer. But there was something in the Belarus files that would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the memoir of a Jew. His name was Solomon. He was one of the 50,000 Jews from an obscure little corner of White Russia run by Stankievich. Sol and a handful of Jews were kept alive as skilled laborers in Stankievich’s concentration camp while 99 percent of their relatives were slaughtered. Sol lost his wife, three children, his entire neighborhood.

This little Jewish barber dug a tunnel under a Nazi concentration camp and led the last hundred Jews in a breakout. The Nazis put out a reward of 10,000 marks on Sol’s head. Sol’s group joined up with other Jewish fugitives in the swamps and forests and formed a resistance group, called Bielski’s Brigade. Hundreds of miles behind Nazi lines, this tiny band of Jews fought back against the men who slaughtered their families; the resisters blew up ammo dumps, rail lines, and fought pitched battles against the collaborators. When the war was over, there were only a few dozen survivors of Bielski’s Brigade, one of the most highly decorated partisan units on the Eastern front. Sol was one of them. [In 2009 their heroism was recognized in the motion picture film “Defiance.” At the end of the movie is a black and white photo of the original members of the Bielski brigade. Sol is in the front row, second from the left.]

Sol recognized quickly that Stalin intended to finish off the work against the Jews that Hitler had started. Sol shot his way out of the Soviet Union, escaped across Central Europe and went to Italy. After several years of delay, Sol received a visa to come to America. When he got here, he did not put the past behind him. He sat down and wrote his memoirs, the story of what had happened to the 50,000 Jews under Stankievich who could not speak for themselves. Sol gave a copy of his memoirs to the government, and the government put them in the classified files, where I stumbled across Sol’s papers three decades later.

You see, I knew what had happened to Stankievich. The State Department promoted him to run an anti-communist propaganda organization in Munich in 1946. On six different occasions, the CIA and the Army’s CIC stopped the State Department’s OPC from smuggling Stankievich into America. They pointed out that Stankievich was not only an admitted war criminal, but also a double agent for the communists. The State Department laughed off the charges. After all, Kim Philby himself had cleared Stankievich to work for British intelligence. The US Army had identified both Stankievich, and his intelligence chief Mikolai Abramtchik, as being in contact with Soviet agents. Their warnings were ignored.

So the OPC brought Stankievich to America under his own name, gave him a job as a broadcaster at Radio Liberty, and arranged for him to become a citizen of the United States. Stankievich used to attend Belarus conventions in South River, New Jersey, where most of the Nazi puppet government had been relocated. They even built a private cemetery for the Belarus SS. It was less than a half-hour away from Sol’s home. Here was a man who had fought against the Nazis and the communists, had come to America to find freedom, and lived in the shadow of the men that had murdered his family.

I knew that if I kept silent, I would be ashamed for the rest of my life. If I walked out of the vaults, I would be the last person to see the Belarus files while the Nazis were still alive. What would you do? I went to the Assistant Attorney General and asked for permission to file a case against an American intelligence agent for war crimes. To the credit of the Carter administration, permission was granted. I quickly assembled a task force to prepare for trial.

Several government investigators tried to locate Sol as a witness against Stankievich, but all of them reported back that he could not be located and, in view of his age, had to be presumed dead. In the meantime, we had assembled an overwhelming case against Stankievich: all the SS records, his own confessions, copies of Nazi newspapers, everything. It was a massive research job.

Stankievich was ungrateful enough to drop dead two weeks before we could file charges against him in Federal District Court. We suspected his timely death was not from natural causes, as it was the Soviet Embassy who informed us of his passing. We had never told them his address in America.

After Stankievich died, the Reagan administration came in. They seemed less than enthusiastic about opening up the secrets in the vaults. I was told to forget what I had seen, ignore how the Nazis came into America, and concentrate now on throwing them out. I quit my job. I told them I would not participate in a cover-up. I gave up my nice safe government career, and wrote the following book about the Belarus Secret, as a case study in the way the world really works. A lot of the manuscript was censored. I get the feeling sometimes that one-third of modern history is classified.

Still, mine is one of the few countries in the world that would have declassified this book. America has the guts to admit its mistakes and correct them, or so I thought. I was pretty naive back in 1982. I went on
60 Minutes
and exposed the whole story.

They got the Emmy award, my family got the death threats. Congress promised to investigate, but it took three years for the General Accounting Office to file its report. They confirmed my charges that Stankievich and a dozen other top Nazis had been protected by U.S. Intelligence, but said they could find no evidence of an organized effort by the U.S. government specifically to bring Nazis to America.

I showed up at the Congressional Hearings with a smoking gun that I had just gotten from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. It was the classified file of the Nazi President of Belarus. In the file was a written proposal to turn his entire network of former collaborators over to U.S. Intelligence. Most of his men were put on the payroll in Germany and subsequently moved to America. Of course, the State Department knew that the Nazis were emigrating en masse. Not only had they handed out the visas, but OPC funded Belarus conventions in New Jersey. Congress was too embarrassed to do anything about it and just dropped the whole issue. The whole story on Nazi immigration is still classified by the British government, and no one wants to embarrass our allies. I had stuck my neck way out and Congress just shrugged its shoulders.