Not only had Hitler given the SS the task of building and managing the Reich’s string of camps; he also had put it in charge of the Final Solution plan to exterminate the Jews and Gypsies of Europe as well as the Reich’s political enemies. To get that massive job done, the SS created Einsatzgruppen or death squads commissioned to liquidate the Jews, Gypsies, and upper- and mid-level communist commissars in German-occupied territories. These squads mopped up behind the German army as it marched east across Europe toward Moscow in Operation Barbarossa. Although they murdered all the Gypsies and communist bureaucrats they could find, the Einsatzgruppen specialized in unarmed, sitting-duck Jews. As the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal succinctly put it: “The purpose of the Einsatzgruppen was to murder Jews and deprive them of their property.”
Given communication barriers and limited manpower, there was no way the Germans could identify, round up, and shoot more than a million Baltic, Belorussian, and Ukrainian Jews without help. To solve the dual problem, the SS recruited volunteers from local populations called
Hundreds of Einsatzgruppen field reports found by the U.S. Army and the Red Army in files in Berlin, as well as Nazi war crimes testimony, detail the work of the Nazi collaborators. Two examples serve to illustrate the degree of their complicity:
• Einsatzgruppe C engaged in an anti-Jewish action near the Ukrainian town of Korosten in September 1941. The group commander divided his unit into squads of thirty men, one of which was made up exclusively of Ukrainian volunteers. He ordered the Jewish victims to kneel in small groups at the edge of a mass grave. Each squad shot at them for about an hour before being replaced by a fresh squad.
• Einsatzgruppe A received orders in October 1941 to liquidate all the Jews in the Belorussian town of Sluzk. The group commander divided his battalion into four companies, two of which were made up entirely of Lithuanian volunteers. After the operation was completed, the commander reported to Berlin “with deepest regrets” that the action “bordered on sadism… with indescribable brutality on the part of both the German police and, particularly, the Lithuanian partisans.”
Heinrich Himmler, commander in chief of the Einsatzgruppen, witnessed a group C commando unit execute one hundred Jews in Minsk, Belorussia, in August 1941, two months after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. According to an eyewitness:
As the firing started, Himmler became more and more nervous. At each volley, he looked down at the ground… The other witness was [General Erich] von dem Bach-Zelewski… Von dem Bach addressed Himmler: “Reichsfuehrer, those were only a hundred…. Look at the eyes of the men in this commando, how deeply shaken they are. Those men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages.”
Historians estimate that the Einsatzgruppen operating in the Soviet-occupied countries murdered between 1.3 and 1.5 million Jews, Gypsies, and communist leaders. Scholars also agree that the thousands of Baltic, Belorussian, and Ukrainian volunteers from local police, partisans, and militia groups were “indispensable” to the slaughter.
Joseph Stalin had no love for Nazi collaborators, whether real or suspected. As a consequence, an estimated two hundred thousand coldblooded Nazi collaborators followed the German army west as the Red Army forced it to retreat, according to German historian Dieter Pohl. After the war, the displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy were bulging with Nazi collaborators.
In effect, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 had a not-so-hidden consequence obvious to anyone who bothered to look for it. More than 70 percent of the refugees eventually admitted under the act (around 280,000) were born in countries occupied or dominated by the Soviet Union. By disproportionately favoring Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Baltic citizens, the bill made it relatively easy for the Nazi collaborators among them to get visas to the United States. The net result? An estimated three to five thousand Nazi collaborators from Iron Curtain countries entered the United States between 1949 and 1953. Some would raise that estimate to as many as ten thousand.
As subsequent chapters will document, the FBI and the CIA welcomed and protected these Nazi collaborators like long-lost relatives. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used them as spies, informants, and anticommunist leaders in their respective emigre communities. And the CIA encouraged and secretly funded their governments-in-exile that were taking root in America.
CHAPTER THREE
As members of Congress began slinking home after passing the Displaced Persons Act, President Truman greeted the new bill with anger and disgust. Congress had delivered an embarrassing piece of legislation founded on “abhorrent intolerance” and left him little choice. The clock was ticking on the refugee bomb and Congress was on summer vacation. Convinced that a flawed act was better than no act, Truman signed the bill, then verbally took the Eightieth “Do Nothing Congress” to the woodshed.
“If Congress were still in session,” he said, “I would return this bill without my approval and urge that a fairer, more humane bill be passed. In its present form, this bill is flagrantly discriminatory. It mocks the American tradition of fair play.”
Truman hoped that special-interest opposition to the bill, mostly from Jews and middle European Catholics, would shame lawmakers into approving a series of corrective amendments. With that in mind, he called a special session of Congress a month after passage of the act and laid out an eleven-point legislative agenda. One point asked for an amended Displaced Persons Act that would eliminate the discriminatory regulations.
Congress failed to act for two years.
Finally, in 1950, Congress extended the act for two more years in a new bill that admitted another two hundred thousand refugees, eliminated the anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic “device,” and erased the preference for farmers and Baltic immigrants. By that time, however, more than one hundred thousand Belorussian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian refugees had already entered the country.
The 1950 act charged the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with deporting refugees who had entered the country illegally and/or had become American citizens illegally. Although the act did not specifically exclude former Nazis and Nazi collaborators, it did bar “any person who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, or national origin.” Important for the future case against John Demjanjuk, the act also excluded refugees who lied “to make themselves eligible for admission.”
It sounded simple on paper. The reality was something else. INS investigators had to find the estimated three to five thousand illegal
To ensure enforcement of the law, the 1950 act also mandated “thorough” investigations of European visa applicants and written reports about their “character, history and eligibility.” It was a logical first step. Unfortunately, the task of investigating more than six hundred thousand visa applicants landed on the overburdened shoulders of the U.S. Army forces stationed in the American Sector of Berlin. The assignment was more than a logistical nightmare. It was impossible, given the conditions in postwar Germany.
It would be difficult to overestimate the confusion and misery that all but swallowed Germany in the months after the war. The sheer number of homeless and displaced persons was staggering. Besides the millions of German soldiers who had to be screened for Nazi affiliation and the more than two hundred thousand SS officers who had to be investigated for possible war crimes, civilian armies of tramps clogged the roads. Ten million were fleeing the rubble and starvation of bombed cities. Another ten million were concentration camp survivors and former slave
