America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (27 page)

A different kind of quisling received their awards in terms of jobs and property. They, too, were recruited among the Lithuanians,

Ukrainians, and White Russians. [Nuremberg] Document E.C. 326, a memorandum [dated] November 26, 1942, on the treatment of Poles, instructed the Nazi administrators in Poland to take care that “in particular, mayors, district and region chiefs of Polish nationality or pro-Polish leaders of large industrial plants and estates will be dismissed and replaced by members of other nationalities (Lithuanians, White Russians, Ukrainians)…. The Polish language … must neither be put on the same level nor be preferred to the use of Lithuanian, White Ruthenian, or Ukrainian.

To buttress his contention that large numbers of SS men who persecuted the Poles and Jews were also hiding in the DP camps, Klein produced additional comments from the OSS expert. He described how the Nuremberg documents clearly showed that many non-German collaborators had served the SS in Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states:

The Baltic and Ukrainian collaborationists proved so loyal to their Nazi masters that the latter incorporated them in the elite corps, in the SS. For a non-German to qualify for membership in the SS, he would need to have proved his total loyalty to Himmler, in short, to be a superkiller. As an isolated report (1137-PS, October 19, 1944) indicates, the Nazis were few, widely distributed, stationed almost entirely in the towns and lost in the maze of villages. To carry out the confiscations, requisitions, recruitment for forced labor, the Nazis used a large force of collaborationists, made up of local residents, without whom these tasks could not have been carried out.

Alerted by such testimony, Congress intended to make certain that Stankievich and others responsible for equally horrifying atrocities would never be permitted to enter the United States. Even persons who had merely been members of collaborationist movements were to be barred. A three-tier system of review was established. First, the IRO had to certify that a visa applicant was eligible, under its standard, as a victim of Nazi oppression. Then the CIC would investigate to determine whether the applicant had ever been a member of a “movement hostile” to the United States. After CIC clearance, a U.S. Displaced Persons Commission created by the law would require an American organization to sponsor and certify that the applicant was of good moral character and had a job waiting for him in the United States.
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Only then could the State Department issue an immigration visa.

As soon as the Displaced Persons Act became law, American religious and charitable organizations went to the DP camps of occupied Germany to sponsor refugees for immigration. Among the camp leaders who played a key role in selecting “worthy” candidates for emigration were Franz Kushel of the Belarus Brigade and Stanislaw Stankievich of Borissow.

The CIC was proud of its role in helping to assure that Nazis were barred from entering the United States. As early as 1945 the agency had assigned a special denazification section to each major district in the American zone in Germany to apprehend Nazi war criminals and prosecute them before special tribunals that supplemented the Nuremberg trials. The CIC‘s record of prosecutions was an admirable one, and, on the whole, it carried out the will of Congress with integrity and efficiency. To be sure, the CIC recruited its share of Nazis to help track down other Nazis, but for the most part these informants were rewarded only with cigarettes or scarce rations. Only a handful of extremely valuable agents were helped to emigrate, and they were sent to the United Kingdom rather than the United States. [For example, Juri Soloviev-Sawadsky told CIC that he was a communist spy posing as a Nazi collaborator. As a reward for identifying other “red Nazi” double agents in the Belarus Brigade, Army intelligence asked Australian intelligence to resettle Sawadsky “down under.” Australian intelligence then lied to the Australian Parliamentary inquiry about his background. Unfortunately, a few zealots in the CIC knowingly permitted Nazi informants to process through for immigration to the United States. Such instances were rare, however, and must be considered in the context of the hundreds of thousands of German denazification and refugee investigation cases that the CIC conducted. [In addition to bringing a few thousand Nazis to America, one officer admitted that OPC had sent so many Nazis to Chile and Argentina, that one day they passed the word that they just refused to take anymore. My counterpart in the West German prosecutors office, the BundesJustizMinisterium, estimated that 150,000 Nazis committed war crimes during WWII, of whom less than 50,000 received even minimal punishment, Most fugitive Nazi war criminals remain in Germany to this day, while significant numbers were resettled by the British—and only later by the Americans – in Australia, Argentina and Canada. The latter probably has the highest per capita Nazi population outside of Germany. Only a few thousand at most, including approximately 300 members of the Belarus Brigade ever reached America.]

This is not to say that the Pentagon was totally precluded from employing Nazis as intelligence agents, especially in Germany, or that the U.S. government never assisted their escape to other countries. In fact, the opposite seems to have been true. One official admitted putting his own fingerprints on documents belonging to a former SS officer who was spying for the military in East Germany. Equipped with a new set of documents and a safe set of prints, the SS man was free to emigrate wherever he chose. Although it was a violation of the Treaty of Montevideo to assist Nazis to find shelter in the Western Hemisphere, the Pentagon, at least where its own interests were concerned, was willing to ignore any Nazi migration to South America. The Soviets got wind of the exodus, and Pravda charged that thousands of Soviet nationals in the American and British zones of occupation were being sent to South America by way of Trieste. [One minor Vatican official wrote that his office had helped resettle 20,000 fugitive German soldiers and technicians to South America.]

[The reason why so relatively few Nazis made it to America is enshrined in the separation of powers doctrine in the U.S. Constitution. Only Congress has the power to determine the qualifications for American residency or citizenship.] It was quite clear that anyone wishing to bring Nazis into the United States would have to do so over the express prohibitions of Congress, in violation of several criminal laws, and against the direct orders of the Commander-in-Chief. Congress and the President were not blind to the needs of national security, however, and exceptions were made. In 1949 a special law was enacted to permit the CIA to bring in not more than a hundred persons a year who were “ineligible” for visas to the United States. As in the case of Mykola Lebed, head of the Ukrainian Gestapo-like SB, Justice and State concealed that he was a wanted war Nazi criminal, and listed his involvement with a pre-war Polish assassination plot as the only grounds for his ineligibility to obtain a regular visa. For the most part the CIA acted in an exemplary fashion under the “Hundred Persons Act.”
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The Pentagon had a similar mechanism for special entry where intelligence considerations were involved.

The State Department had no legal authority to waive immigration provisions for OPC recruits. The power to suspend entry requirements temporarily did not even exist until 1951, and even then Congress insisted, as it had in the “Hundred Persons Act,” that entry would be permitted only for a brief visit for reasons of national security.
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Even then, some congressmen argued that the waiver law and the “Hundred Persons Act” could never be used to provide a mechanism for Nazis and fascists to enter the United States.

[In the Top Secret Bloodstone Files of the National Security Council are the records of a meeting Wisner had with the Justice Department. Both were concerned about what would happen if Congress ever learned about “the few bad apples” that were being brought to America. The Deputy Attorney General explained to Wisner that there was no legal way Justice could accomplish this, so the best approach would be to shift the blame to the Army, which was much more likely to escape Congressional wrath. Wisner concurred. ] Wisner’s plans to build an anticommunist liberation movement required that large numbers of “freedom fighters” be brought to America, but it was too substantial an operation to escape CIC scrutiny. Inasmuch as Attorney General Tom C. Clark was helping prepare the Nuremberg war crimes prosecutions, Wisner knew not to push his friends at Justice while Truman was still President. As the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Countries, Wisner had already placed his own agents in key State Department visa offices, and his involvement in Operation Paperclip helped him learn how to circumvent the CIC‘s screening process.

In recruiting the German scientists, the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency reported to the State-Navy-War Coordinating Committee, a predecessor of the National Security Council. In the State Department’s 1947 telephone directory, the room assigned to the SNWCC liaison at State was also the office of Frank Wisner, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Countries. According to State Department Security officials, this office had almost unlimited access to the visa channels of persons wishing to emigrate to America from occupied Germany.

There was a weak point in the CIC‘s system. All of its information on Nazi war criminals was stored in one consolidated CIC file in West Germany. During the period in which the DPs came to the United States the file was located first at Frankfurt and then Stuttgart, before being moved to its current home at the United States Army Investigative Records Repository (USAIRR) at Fort Meade, Maryland. The CIC gathered information from every conceivable source: agents in the DP camps, Nazi personnel records, and from other intelligence services, most of which maintained liaison officers at the Stuttgart central files.

For reasons of national security, the author has been requested to delete certain details of the file-laundering process and to state only that “various intelligence agencies had access to the central files at the Stuttgart CIC. [Now that the security restrictions have been lifted, I can confirm that OPC’s Boris Pash had a file clerk inside CIC who worked for him. Ostensibly an Army officer, Pash was identified during the Church Committee hearings as being in charge of OPC Program Branch 7, responsible for assassinations. Similarly, access to the CIC central index was granted to a liaison from the British Army of the Rhine. The BAOR liaison later confessed to being a communist double agent. Two of the American political commanders (OMGUS) worked for OPC, as did the French OMGUS liaison, Jean Francois Poncet. Francois Poncet had been a Nazi informant for Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo during the war, and then worked for OPC’s predecessor WDD, after the war. WDD was the code name for Allen Dulles’ secret unit.]

It is not surprising, then that in 1985 the Justice Department falsely put the blame on the Army for the Klaus Barbie case, and pretended not to know what the “WDD” was that Barbie worked for. The CIC never knew that there were OPC “ringers” combing through their central files. It is not surprising therefore, that not all the information in the CIC’s files was released to CIC agents, several of whom were Jews who scrupulously obeyed the edict against Nazi immigration. Each of the other American intelligence agencies devoted a great deal of effort to spying on CIC, and jealously guarded the Nazis in its employ. If a CIC field agent in Frankfurt conducted a visa check on a Nazi who was secretly working for Military Intelligence in Munich, the MIS liaison to the CIC Central Records Repository would simply “red-flag” his agent’s records so that any queries would come to him. Consequently, no information would be released. CIC Stuttgart would then report to the field agent that the central files contained “no derogatory information” and the MIS agent would be allowed to emigrate, in spite of his Nazi background. Under General Clay’s direction, the MIS had used this system to sanitize incriminating information in the CIC files about the German scientists brought to the United States by Operation Paperclip.

Wisner approached Clay and received similar access for his “Special Forces” staff. This file-laundering system worked well, and derogatory information was withheld from the CIC field investigators checking on visa applicants. For example, the CIC had a thick dossier on Stanislaw Hrynkievich which listed the fact that he had been arrested in 1945 as a security suspect, had confessed during imprisonment to being a Nazi collaborator, and had also admitted being vice president of the White Ruthenian “self-help” committee in Berlin, which was enough by itself to place him in the CIC‘s “automatic arrest” category. Moreover, he had been a ranking member of the central committee of the Byelorussian government, which made him both a “quisling” and a member of a “movement hostile.” Placed on top of all these incriminating documents is a letter from the Central Repository to the CIC visa investigator stating that its records showed that Hrynkievich was a medical-school student in Berlin who was staunchly anticommunist. This was the only information furnished to the DP Commission,
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and Hrynkievich was permitted to go to the United States despite his having been imprisoned by the Americans for his Nazi activities, and despite his denial of this fact on his visa form.
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After the CIC check was evaded, the rest was easy. Few immigration officials had even heard of Byelorussia. Since the Soviets did not furnish information to the IRO, it was barely mentioned in the agency manual. Most of the émigrés did not even bother to change their names, since usually all that was necessary to defeat the CIC filing system was a minor variation in spelling. For example, the highest-ranking collaborator under the administration of General Wilhelm Kube, Dr. Ivan Ermachenko, emigrated to the U.S. as Dr. John Jermaczenko, a permissible phonetic transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet of Byelorussia into the Latin alphabet of Poland. Most Belarus émigrés had already listed their birthplace as Polish Byelorussia to avoid the earlier repatriation efforts, and so use of the Polish form of their surname was consistent with their previous cover stories. The name translation ploy was so successful that it enabled the majority of Byelorussians to escape detection from the even more antiquated filing systems of the FBI. The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice did not even pretend to maintain an efficient filing system.