Useful Enemies

then as OSI’s last director. During the more than thirty years of OSI existence, government prosecutors won 107 cases against Nazi war criminals and prevented hundreds more from entering the United States. And at least seven suspected Nazis and Nazi collaborators facing investigation committed suicide.

In 2009, the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a country-by-country report card on how aggressively and well each nation had pursued and prosecuted Nazi war criminals. The center gave the United States straight As every single year from 2000 to date. Despite this “scorecard” success, OSI’s 2006 draft internal history of its search for and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States noted that Rosenbaum was “haunted by the belief that additional prosecutions could have been brought had there been more resources—both financial and manpower—available.”

Elizabeth Holtzman began chasing former Nazis through legislation beginning in 1974 after she reviewed the Karbach list files in New York. Over the years, she continued to badger the Justice Department to find and expel Nazis and Nazi collaborators, through her legislative work in Congress and her international network of contacts.

Most recently, Holtzman worked as a consultant in the framing and enactment of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, sponsored by Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio and Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York. The 1978 Holtzman Amendment laid the foundation for the disclosure act, which mandated the declassification and release of files and documents dealing with Nazis known to be, or suspected of being, war criminals. The act further mandated that President Clinton create an interagency working group (IWG) to serve as a watchdog over U.S. intelligence agencies and departments that are custodians of Nazi war crimes documents. Clinton appointed Holtzman to the IWG board.

To date, more than eight million pages from the files of agencies under the umbrellas of the departments of State, Justice, and Defense have been declassified, the largest disclosure in U.S. history. Unfortunately, thousands of those pages have been removed from storage boxes and folders under the notice “Access Restricted.” Thousands more have been so heavily redacted that they are virtually useless. And there are hundreds of references to files, reports, and documents either missing or still classified.

In spite of their limitations and gaps, however, the newly released documents illustrate how the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the CIA opened a wide door for former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. These documents also reveal the identities of many of the war criminals that U.S. government agencies protected in a cynical perversion of justice. How America welcomed those major war criminals stands in stark contrast to how it hounded minor war criminal John Demjanjuk.

THE F.B.I.

As incomplete as they are, the newly declassified documents lead to several inescapable conclusions about the FBI’s role in protecting both proven and alleged Nazi war criminals in America. First, there can be no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover collected Nazis and Nazi collaborators like pennies from heaven. Unlike the military and its highly structured Operation Paperclip—with its specific targets, systematic falsification of visa applications, and creation of bogus biographies—Hoover had no organized program to find, vet, and recruit alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators as confidential sources, informants, and unofficial spies in emigre communities around the country. America’s number-one crime buster was guided only by opportunism and moral indifference.

Each Nazi collaborator that his agents stumbled upon, or learned about from the CIA, was both a potential spy and a potential anticommunist leader. Once they were discovered, Hoover sought them out, used them, and protected them. He had no interest in reporting alleged Nazi war criminals to the INS, the Justice Department, or the State Department for possible deportation or extradition. He appeared smug in his simplistic division of Americans into shadeless categories of bad guys and good guys, communists and anticommunists.

Hoover was careful about the number of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators he placed on the FBI payroll. If Congress or its investigative arm, the GAO, ever insisted on a tally, he could say with a straight face that there were only a handful of paid confidential sources and informants. But if one adds the war criminals he informally cultivated and used, the number ranges well into the hundreds.

Although some of the snapshots may be out of focus, the big picture is clear from the newly declassified documents. Hoover and the FBI knew the identities, addresses, and backgrounds of up to a thousand alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators on whom he had files but did not report to INS, Justice, State, or OSI. Among the newly revealed Nazi collaborators that Hoover and the FBI used and protected were John Avdzej, Laszlo Agh, and Vladimir Sokolov.

During the war, Belorussian John Avdzej had been installed as the Nazi’s puppet mayor of the Niasvizh district in western Belorussia, once part of Poland. His first mayoral job was to rid his district of all Poles. As a first step, he gave the Gestapo a list of 120 Polish intelligentsia that included journalists, professors, priests, and former military officers, according to recently declassified intelligence files. Then he took part in their execution, as well as in the murder of thousands of Jews under his political jurisdiction. The Polish Home Army condemned him to death in absentia.

The United States was responsible for bringing Avdzej to America. Hoover snapped him up and protected him until 1984, when OSI charged him with visa fraud. Facing trial and possible extradition for war crimes, Avdzej voluntarily left the United States for West Germany, where he died a free man in 1998.

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Laszlo Agh was a wartime member the Hungarian Arrow Cross, an anti-Semitic group of fascists responsible for the murder of ten to fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews and the deportation to Auschwitz of another eighty thousand.

According to twelve eyewitnesses, Agh had personally rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and killed hundreds of Hungarian Jews. The torture included forced calisthenics to the point of unconsciousness, burial in the ground up to the neck until dead, and orders to jump on ground studded with partially buried bayonets.

Agh intrigued Hoover. A bitterly anticommunist leader had fallen into his lap and Hoover quickly recruited him as an unofficial informant. When the INS began to investigate Agh, the FBI refused to cooperate. As a result, Agh was never tried for visa fraud. Like Avdzej, he died a free man.

Russian Vladimir Sokolov (aka Vladimir Samarin) was a senior editor and writer for Rech (Speech), a German-controlled, anti-Semitic Russian newspaper. He entered the United States in July 1951. Like Romanian Iron Guardist editor Viorel Trifa, Sokolov penned articles calling for the extermination of Russian Jews as enemies of the people. Jews advised Stalin, he wrote, started the German-Soviet war, and controlled the White House. Only Germany and its allies had the wisdom to understand the international Jewish conspiracy and the courage to fight “the Kikes of the world.” After the war, Moscow placed Sokolov on its most-wanted list, claiming it had concrete proof that he had worked with the Gestapo as a propagandist and had personally identified Jews for execution.

The FBI, on the other hand, considered Sokolov a “sincere, outspoken anti-Communist [and] a potential source.” At one point, he even taught Russian language and literature at Yale University. “How a man with no high academic credentials suddenly procured such a prestigious position is a mystery,” wrote historian Norman Goda. “It is clear that the FBI used him as an informant while at Yale, possibly to report on Russian students.”

If Sokolov was spying for a U.S. intelligence agency, he was probably an asset in Redcap, a CIA program to collect information on Soviets living and studying abroad. The CIA as well as the FBI wanted to know if a Soviet alien was a KGB mole and, if not, whether he or she could be flipped. Redcap assets were asked to collect information on selected targets. Besides a photograph and handwriting sample, Redcap wanted: a list of non-Soviet contacts; a description of personality, habits, and hobbies; his or her political vulnerability; and the planned date of return to the Soviet Union. Of particular interest to Redcap was information on extramarital affairs that could be used for blackmail.

OSI filed charges against Sokolov for visa fraud and won its case. A federal court stripped him of his U.S. citizenship. To avoid deportation to the Soviet Union, where he would face a public trial and certain execution, Sokolov fled to Canada. He died a free man in 1992.

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However shocking and reprehensible, Hoover’s use of alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators is just a small