Department, and FBI documents; historian John Lewis Gaddis published his much-anticipated biography,
These new documents and books show that what Loftus wrote about Emanuel Jasiuk was accurate. They also shed critical light on Loftus’s allegations against the State Department and clarify the lines of responsibility for America’s open-door policy for Nazi war criminals. In sum, they prove that Loftus was much more right than wrong.
THE BELORUSSIAN QUISLINGS
Loftus alleged that the Germans prepared for the invasion of Belorussia by recruiting teams of exiled Belorussians to become the backbone of the new Belorussian Nazi puppet government. The allegation is important because it is the foundation for Loftus’s specific charge that the United States brought at least three hundred Belorussian quisling war criminals into the country.
Books devoted specifically to the collaboration of Belorussians with their Nazi occupiers during World War II are rare in the West. Historian Leonid Rein’s 2011 work,
According to Rein, Belorussian exiles living in Germany and Poland prepared for the Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Those living in Berlin formed a group called “The Center,” whose members were selected to form the leadership of the quisling government after Operation Barbarossa. At the same time, exiles living in Poland helped German military intelligence establish a saboteur training center outside Warsaw. Shaped into teams of up to fifty men, the Belorussian saboteurs were parachuted behind the Soviet lines with instructions to blow up strategic railroads and bridges in preparation for the German invasion.
Also with the help of Belorussian exiles in Germany and Poland, the leaders of Einsatzgruppe B selected Belorussian volunteers to help their 655 Einsatzkommandos identify, round up, rob, and kill Jews. The Germans called their volunteers “trusted people” (
After the invasion, the Germans formed an estimated thirty thousand, two-men teams (German estimate) and appointed them to the two key positions in local governments throughout Belorussia—mayor and police chief. The teams and their minions made the execution of eight hundred thousand Jews in eighteen months possible. Public support for the genocide was, for the most part, largely irrelevant to the success of the operation.
Belorussian Boris Grushevsky witnessed the brutality of the police in the town of Stolpce: “The policemen were sitting on the top of this pit. They had submachine guns. There were also several Germans. It was the policemen who shot. The Jews were standing in columns in front of the pit…. The Jews were made to take off their clothes and approach the pit, a few at a time, and enter it. They lay down and were shot…. Some of the Jews were only wounded and tried to get up. Blood was gushing from their wounds.”
In screening potential team members, the Germans looked for volunteers who were anticommunist, not Jewish, and preferably not Polish. Administrative skills or experience were not factors. The tasks assigned to the teams were to control the local population, keep peace and order, supply the Germans with food and goods on demand, and help exterminate Jews. As Rein concluded, the quisling mayors and police chiefs played “a prominent role in the persecution of Belorussian Jews—especially their ghettoization—and in the requisition and disposal of murdered Jews’ property.”
The Germans eventually installed a mostly symbolic national puppet government with a president and cabinet. “The Germans made it clear,” Rein wrote, “[that] their duty was solely to help weed out ‘the enemies of the state.’”
Loftus had reached a broad, sweeping conclusion about Belorussian collaboration in the Holocaust: that no other country in Eastern Europe matched Belorussia in its willingness to assist the Nazis in exterminating Jews and in the barbarity of its collaborators. Rein agrees with part of Loftus’s conclusion. “In most cases,” he wrote, “local [Belorussian] policemen participated enthusiastically in the massacres, displaying a measure of cruelty that the Germans themselves often found repulsive.” But he rejects the rest of Loftus’s conclusion that Belorussia stood out as the worst Holocaust collaborator in Eastern Europe. Rein suggests that Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine were just as enthusiastic and cruel as Belorussia in helping Nazi Einsatzgruppen identify, ghettoize, rob, and murder Jews—a charge even more damning than Loftus’s.
THE OPEN-DOOR POLICY
The most important allegation Loftus made was that the United States had formally adopted an open-door policy for former Nazi war criminals and that the Department of State was mostly responsible for the policy. Military, State Department, and National Security Council documents declassified since the publication of
In February 1946, less than a year after the war in Europe was over, Washington posed a question to the U.S. embassy in Moscow—what the hell are the Russkies up to? U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman chose George Kennan, a bored and brooding junior foreign service officer with a keen mind, a degree from Princeton, and a flair for writing, to craft an intelligent response to that rather embarrassing question. Kennan was a logical embassy choice. He spoke Russian fluently and, like his father, had traveled to all corners of the country, including Siberia and its gulags. A serious student of Russian history, politics, and literature, Kennan understood the “Russian soul” better than any foreign service officer, including Harriman.
From his sickbed, Kennan dictated an answer to a stenographer in what is known as the Long Telegram, a six-thousand-word cable that suggested—for the first time—a clear and coherent U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. The Long Telegram also became the first link in a chain of decisions leading to a U.S. open-door policy for former Nazi war criminals and established Kennan as America’s top Kremlinologist, ensuring him a primary role in formulating that policy.
After treating Washington to a much-needed lesson on the nature and character of the Russian people, Kennan offered two reasoned and sobering conclusions about how to deal with the Soviet Union. First, there could be “no permanent peaceful coexistence” with the USSR because the Kremlin never compromised by signing treaties and pacts. The Soviets were so insecure that they could only maintain power by ruthlessly destroying rivals. Second, “military intervention [was]… sheerest nonsense [and] should be forestalled at all cost.”
By eliminating the two options of peaceful coexistence and war, Kennan left Washington with only one choice—containment. The United States, he argued, could ultimately defeat communism if it prevented the cancer from spreading to the non-Soviet nations of Western Europe, and if it developed strategies and programs that fractured the Soviet empire in so many places that it would slowly crumble.
Kennan planted several seeds in the Long Telegram that would bear fruit in the next four years. First, the best way to contain the Soviets was to help rebuild the nations of Western Europe (and Japan) so that they would have the will, strength, and resources to fight and defeat Soviet influences in their homelands. That seed would soon flower into the five-year Marshall Plan.
To
