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This two-tier American policy in Germany occurred again and again throughout the cold war and was not so different, in fact, from the practice of the French, British, and Soviet governments. It combined a public condemnation and pursuit of fugitive Nazi criminals, on the one hand, with secret protection and utilization of some of the same men, on the other. Leaks were everywhere, however, and such protection did not remain truly secret for long. As the contradictory two-tier system gradually matured during the late 1940s, it became routine for U.S. intelligence agencies to defy the announced policies of the American government concerning Nazi fugitives. Public leaders in Germany (including newspaper reporters, for example, as well as political officials) tacitly cooperated with the intelligence agencies. “Well-informed people knew that this had to be done,” says a former State Department political affairs officer who prefers anonymity, “and it was better to avoid any fuss.”

By the end of 1947 the U.S. Army had begun at least a half dozen large-scale programs designed to tap the talents of SS and German military intelligence veterans. Operation Pajamas, for example, organized “exploitation of German personnel used in forecasting European political trends.” Birchwood did the same with “economic experts,” in this context clearly suggesting men who had worked for the SS and for Goering. Project Dwindle collected Nazi cryptographic experts and equipment. Apple Pie, a joint U.S.-British operation, recruited “certain key personnel of [SS] RSHA Amt VI” who were expert in Soviet industrial and economic matters, according to the U.S. orders that established the code word designators for the program. Project Panhandle undertook “operational exploitation”—in other words, recruitment for pay—”of German ex-Military Intelligence personnel for collecting military intelligence on the USSR and its satellites.” Project Credulity traced German scientists wanted for the JIOA Paperclip project. These efforts, though highly secret from the general public, were nevertheless approved and managed through regular intelligence channels. They received conventional code names and were financed in the normal army intelligence budget.
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These were not a conspiracy within the intelligence community to defy the rest of the government; these exploitation programs were the official, though secret, U.S. policy.

Virtually all U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the pursuit of war criminals had collapsed by mid-1946, with the important exception of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg. It is possible to debate endlessly over who exactly was to blame for the deterioration of the earlier efforts to bring Nazi criminals to justice. The competition over scientists and industrial laboratories was clearly a factor. So was the larger and more fundamental struggle over spheres of influence in France, Central Europe, and the Middle East. Any way one looks at it, however, it is clear that the failure of East and West to work together to prosecute war crimes suspects provided tickets to freedom, in effect, for thousands of the men and women who were responsible for the Holocaust and other outrages.

Belligerent confrontations began between East and West over just what did, and did not, constitute prosecutable war crimes as early as the summer of 1945. This conflict was particularly sharp in the cases of prominent members of Catholic political parties from Eastern Europe. The Soviets argued that many of these conservative Christian Democratic politicians had carried their countries into an open alliance with the Nazis, that they then had served as responsible officials in Axis regimes and had helped establish or administer laws for registration of Jews, creation of concentration camps, and the rest. Therefore, the Soviet reasoning went, these officials had contributed to the persecution of innocent people—or were at least suspects—and should be delivered to postwar Eastern European governments for trial.

Many American and other Western officials, on the other hand, preferred to concentrate on the role that the same religious parties had played on the eve of Germany's defeat, when much of the Christian Democratic establishment in Eastern Europe had turned against the Nazis. Although the United States had formally agreed as early as 1943 to turn over war criminals to the country where they had committed crimes, by 1945 U.S. policymakers were viewing anti-Communist Catholic leaders as an essential part of postwar coalition governments in Eastern Europe. The United States interpreted many Soviet war crimes accusations as basically political charges tailored to undermine Western influence in the region.

The question of how to handle suspected war criminals was further complicated by serious East-West disputes over repatriation of refugees. At least 8 million displaced people from Eastern Europe
were living in hovels in occupied Germany and Austria in 1945. The United States, Britain, and the USSR had agreed at the Yalta Conference that these people were to be returned to their various homelands, where it was hoped they would be reintegrated into postwar society. Contrary to the lurid accounts that appeared in the West during the cold war, the overwhelming majority of these refugees voluntarily returned to their countries of origin without incident.

But the fact remained that between 1 and 2 million of the refugees did not wish to go back. Many of those who refused to return viewed themselves as heroes, of a sort, who had rebelled against Stalin even though that had entailed working with the Nazis. The Soviets, however, regarded most of the remaining refugees as people who had committed serious acts of treason, and Stalin insisted that they be returned. This harsh judgment was not entirely without justification, because a substantial number of the émigrés were, in fact, the former soldiers, SS volunteers, or quisling officials of the Nazis. “Treason” to the Soviets, however, also included acts such as public criticism of the Communist party, which was hardly considered a crime in the West.

The American and British authorities cooperated in the repatriation programs for a time, but with increasing reluctance. The prospect of driving an innocent person into Stalin's USSR against his or her will was distasteful to most Westerners, for obvious reasons. The majority of the remaining displaced persons appeared to be political or economic émigrés, by Western standards, not war criminals.

Western reluctance to turn over refugees—and criminal suspects—to the Soviets was reinforced as word trickled back from the East concerning the fates of some of those who had been delivered during the first months after the war. Trials of suspect quislings and native-born SS men in the East were generally a mere formality in those days and often dispensed with altogether. Thousands of summary executions were carried out in the USSR, Poland, and other areas under Red Army control. Modern historians in Yugoslavia concede that “tens of thousands” of Nazi collaborators were killed, often without trial, in that small country alone during 1945.
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And millions of men and women from throughout Eastern Europe were deported to forced labor camps deep inside the USSR, many never to return.

Soviet suspicions that the West was intentionally harboring persons they considered traitors and war criminals expanded side by
side with the West's growing reluctance to repatriate refugees. The already tense relations between the superpowers further deteriorated. The USSR refused to participate in the CROWCASS identification project or in most other war crimes inquiries sponsored by the Western Allies. Western investigators were generally barred from gathering evidence concerning incidents that had taken place inside Eastern Europe, and the bulk of evidence concerning Fascist crimes collected by the USSR was kept sealed off from the outside world in carefully restricted archives.

The Soviet position on such matters, stated briefly, was that if the West was holding a war crimes suspect, it should simply turn him or her over to the NKVD, which would conduct an investigation. No outside examiners were needed or wanted. Although the USSR did make a vital contribution to the prosecutions at Nuremberg, the fact remains that the unmistakable priority of Soviet investigators during the first years after the war was to lay hands upon any refugee or POW who might conceivably pose a political threat to regions under Russian control and only secondarily to collect evidence of crimes against humanity.

Why did the Soviets refuse to cooperate more fully with the admittedly imperfect and limited efforts that the United States did make to bring war criminals to justice? The people of the Soviet Union, after all, had suffered far more terribly at the hands of the Nazis than those of the United States. And the USSR did undertake a massive (but usually completely independent) effort to locate and punish Nazis and collaborators inside the Soviet-occupied territories.

The reasons for the Soviets' intransigence on this point are open to speculation. The U.S. use of CROWCASS to locate promising Nazi intelligence recruits was no doubt part of the reason. But that cannot be taken as a complete explanation; recruiting defectors from the enemy is, after all, a standard intelligence practice in wartime, one which the Soviets themselves regularly employed.

A more persuasive argument is that especially during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the NKVD had committed a number of atrocities of its own that would have been impossible to conceal if Western investigators were permitted access to the Soviet zone. Public proof of these crimes would likely have been a major setback for the USSR at the time, threatening the Soviets' still-fragile hold over Eastern Europe and undermining the USSR's attempts at expanded political and trade relations with the West.

One notable example of the politically explosive nature of the NKVD's crimes was the Katyn Forest massacre, which remains a bitter problem in Soviet-Polish relations to this day. The preponderance of available evidence in this still-controversial episode points to the conclusion that Soviet security troops executed approximately 8,000 nationalist Polish army officers taken prisoner during 1939, then stacked the bodies like cordwood in mass graves at an isolated outpost. Similar NKVD mass killings of unarmed Ukrainian prisoners took place at Lvov, Dubno, and Vinnitsa, near the present Soviet-Polish border.

Other examples include the NKVD's forced deportation of some 35,000 to 50,000 “suspect” Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians to Siberian exile in 1940 and 1941, which has remained a rigidly enforced secret inside the USSR ever since.
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Soviet security troops also seized approximately 1 million politically suspect Poles during the course of the war and shipped them in railroad cars to gulag prisons and labor camps in Central Asia and Siberia. There tens of thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of thousands were worked to death.

Nor did these practices end with the termination of the Hitler-Stalin pact. By the end of the war Stalin had developed a deeply rooted hatred of several minority groups in the USSR that he regarded as disloyal. As the Red Army reclaimed Soviet territory from the Nazis during 1943 and 1944, special police troops moved in behind the front to secure the ethnic minority regions of the USSR. In some parts of the country all the men, women, and children of entire Soviet nationality groups—the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, and Volga Germans, among others—were rounded up at gunpoint and exiled to remote settlements deep inside the country for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. Indeed, as Nikita Khrushchev himself later commented, the entire Ukrainian ethnic group “avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise,” Khrushchev continued, Stalin “would have deported them also.”
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The political price involved in admitting such disgraces was clearly higher than Stalin was willing to pay, and none of this could have been concealed for long had the USSR fully cooperated with war crimes investigations. Instead, the Soviets chose to solicit whatever CROWCASS information they could obtain through the various joint Allied control commissions and committees, at the same time undertaking on their own a vast criminal investigation that
was kept carefully sealed off from Western eyes. Only in this way was it possible to maintain the “security” of the USSR—and the NKVD—throughout the purges of Nazi criminals.

It is also clear that the Soviets, like the Western Allies, were engaged in their own recruiting of selected Nazi agents whom they believed to be useful for intelligence or political purposes. The history of that recruitment has been suppressed in the East and is unlikely to be made public anytime soon. A number of documented cases have come to light, however, largely as a result of splits among Eastern Europe's Communist parties during the last thirty years.

Some measure of the scope of the Soviet's Nazi recruitment efforts may be found in Romania. There the country's Communist party, which was thoroughly dominated by a Muscovite clique in the first years after the war, swelled from about 1,000 old-timers in 1945 to some 714,000 members by the end of 1947. Several years later, however, a much more nationalistic faction of Romania's Communist party took control and purged many Muscovite leaders, including the party chairman Ana Pauker and secret police chief Teohari Georgescu. That, in turn, led to public revelations of the extent to which Georgescu had relied on recruitment of Fascist Iron Guard veterans for his police apparatus during the first years after the war. According to Nicolae Ceau§escu, the Romanian party's present chairman, the new ruling group purged more than 300,000 “alien careerist elements, including Iron Guardists and hostile persons” who had entered the party's ranks during the height of Stalin's influence in that country.
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Somewhat similar situations have been reported in both East Germany and Hungary, where Soviet occupation authorities permitted so-called little Nazis to remain in the police apparatus as a means of stabilizing power.

Yugoslavia's split with the USSR in 1948 also brought forth reliable information concerning the extent to which Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria relied on Nazi collaborators for clandestine operations. According to an official Yugoslav government statement to the United Nations, Beria's police “created a vast network of spies … [trained] in the USSR and composed mainly of fascists who had enlisted in the one and only regiment which the Croatian [Ustachi] traitor Pavelić had been able to place at Hitler's disposal.” The purpose of the Soviet maneuver, the Yugoslavs charged, was seizure of the government of their country.