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America's Nazi Secret

Written by John Loftus

Reviewed by Dennis Moore

In a December 12, 2010 Associated Press story in the San Diego Union-Tribune Newspaper, titled "Report Details Ties Between U.S., Ex-Nazis," it indicates that CIA documents show intelligence officials provided more aid than previously known to ex-Nazis. Former U.S. government prosecutor, and former Army officer, John Loftus, has written a hardhitting book that exposes U.S. Department of Justice cover-up of Nazis and their American partners, "America's Nazi Secret," that parallels this report. The original version of this book, also by Loftus, "The Belarus Secret," was the "Knopf Nominee" for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and earned "60 Minutes" an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Thirty years later, this final manuscript has not been submitted for government review. All the censored items, and more, much more, are revealed for the first time. A third of modern history has been classified, until now.

Loftus makes some sensational allegations in his book, such as the rise of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Enron's manic diversion of funds to Pakistan, both having their roots in the second generation Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood, protected by the US Justice Department. It seems as if there is enough complicity to spread around.

Dr. Vitold Tumash, who now lives in New York City, acknowledged to Mike Wallace on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 16, 1982) that he had been mayor of Minsk for three months but denied having anything to do with the extermination of the Jews, according to Loftus' book. Captured Nazi documents in the National Archives tell a different story. They not only identify him as the mayor of Minsk but also reveal the municipal authorities supervised the ghetto and issued passports for the elimination of racial undesirables. (Report of 20 July, 1941, Military Administration Group, Army Group Center, National Archives Microfilm Section T175, Roll 2533, Frames 292820-821.) One of Tumash's fellow Byelorussians has written a book in which he states that Tumash solicited Franz Kushel (original manuscript) to organize a Byelorussian police force in Minsk (Konstantine Akula, Combat Trails). There is a copy of this book, published in Byelorussian, in the Library of Congress, according to Loftus.

It should be noted that "The Belarus Secret" is the first full account of an extraordinary clandestine operation carried out in direct defiance of presidential orders: How certain government agencies, in the aftermath of World War II, smuggled into the United States hundreds of Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe - and have continued to protect them from investigation and deportation. This is the premise of Loftus' "America's Nazi Secret."

According to Loftus, the Nuremburg Trials were fixed, and the U.S. Justice Department did it. Also, according to Loftus, some of America's most influential families funded Hitler, and that ambitious lawyers in Washington covered it up under a cloak of national security. He alleges that the Justice Department brought Nazis into America by the thousands to be trained as cold war spies. Supporting documentation and National Archives that Loftus provides in his book makes some of these allegations undeniable.

"America's Nazi Secret" is an insider's history of how the United States Department of Justice obstructed Congress by: Blocking Congressional Investigations into famous American families who funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists; Lying to Congress, the GAO and the CIA about the Postwar Immigration of Eastern European Nazi war criminals to the US; and concealing from the 9/11 investigators the role of the Arab Nazi war criminals in recruiting modern Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

The aforementioned Union-Tribune story, certainly lends credence to Loftus' "America's Nazi Secret," as it indicates that declassified CIA files reveal that U.S. intelligence officials went to great lengths to protect a Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator from prosecution after World War II and used him to stir up trouble inside the Soviet Union from an office in New York, according to a new report to Congress. The report, titled "Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War," draws from an unprecedented trove of records that the CIA was persuaded to declassify, and from more than 1 million digitized Army intelligence files that had long been inaccessible. The authors of this particular report, Norman J.W. Goda of the University of Florida and Richard Breitman of American University in Washington, among other things, indicate that U.S. intelligence officials used and protected ex-Nazis during the Cold War to a greater extent than previously known, and that no American intelligence agency aided Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann's escape from Europe after the war.

In the Report by Goda and Breitman, referenced in the Union-Tribune story, it indicates that a Mykola Lebed led an underground movement to undermine the Kremlin and wage guerrilla operations for the CIA during the Cold War. This is the same Mykola Lebed that Loftus references in his "America's Nazi Secret,"under CIA codename "QR/Plumb/2 (P/2), as one of the most wanted war criminals in the Soviet Union. It doesn't take much to connect the dots between Goda and Breitman's Report, and Loftus' "America's Nazi Secret." Actually, Loftus was making these assertions in the 1980s, in his "The Belarus Secret."

In further regard to the aforementioned Mykola Lebed, Loftus points out in his book that it seems Congress did not know it, but the Attorney General of the United States had personally approved the immigration of Mykola Lebed, arguably the highest-ranking Nazi war criminal ever to enter the United States. Lebed was the head of the SB, the Ukrainain version of the Gestapo, and one of the top twenty war criminals wanted by the Soviet Union. Justice had given a false biography to the CIA. According to Loftus, CIA thought Lebed was an anti-Nazi resistance leader who could not immigrate legally to the US because he had been involved in plotting the death of a pre-war Polish politician.

Loftus relies on factual evidence and government documents to support his claims and contentions in regard to Mykola Lebed, among others. He states that National Archives Box 16 of the CIA's documents contains the files for Lebed, whom the CIA innocently believed to be a leader of the Anti Nazi resistance in the Ukraine, further stating that Justice Department Officials Richard Sullivan and Alan Ryan knew that Lebed was actually head of the Ukrainian version of the Gestapo, the SB, hired by CIA's rivals in the State Department OPC, and sponsored for immigration by the Attorney General of the United States. Loftus says that the Justice Department knowingly assisted the former Nazis of the SB with illegal entry into the United States. It begs the question, why? At times, "America's Nazi Secret" reads like a Robert Ludlum novel, but factual. Loftus further states in his book that Lebed's men had murdered tens of thousands of Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian citizens, and that he knew it to be true, because he found the original files of Mykola Lebed in the Army Intelligence vaults at Suitland, Maryland, and showed them to his superiors at the Justice Department: Ryan and Sullivan. He says that it will be impossible for them to deny that they were briefed in detail before allowing this killer to enter the United States.

Loftus points out in "America's Nazi Secret" that factionalism is the bane of emigre political organizations, and that increasingly remote from the reality of their homelands, the exiles exist in a hothouse atmosphere that breeds a mixture of intrigue and paranoia, with each faction becoming convinced that it alone is the legitimate instrument of struggle for national liberation, and the fights between them take on the bitterness of a family argument. He further indicates in his book that this is exactly what happened among the Byelorussians. Loftus states in his book that Princess Radziwill, a distant relative of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, was listed among the Byelorussian Nazi ranks, as were several Catholic priests and bishops.

Loftus further points out in his book that the central characters in the Byelorussian machinations, were Radoslaw Ostrowsky, President of the Byelorussian Central Council, and his intelligence chief, Mikolai Abramtchik. Poignant, and somewhat poetic, Loftus states that there came a point when Nazi Germany was dying in a Wagnerian funeral pyre ignited by Hitler, and Ostrowsky was determined to avoid the flames.

Loftus learned that Byelorussia, sometimes called White Russia, had become a post-war Soviet Republic with a population of some eight million. It borders on Poland in the West, Lithuania and Latvia in the northwest, Russia in the east, and the Ukraine in the south. During World War II, Byelorussia was occupied by the Germans from 1941 to 1944, and was one of the most devastated regions of the Soviet Union. Some of its citizens served the Nazi puppet government and some even served in an SS unit known as the Belarus Brigade which fought against the Americans, Loftus states in this riveting book. It was these ex-Nazis, now thought to be living in the United States, who were the object of the Office of Special Investigations inquiry, the unit that Loftus was attached to as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s. This Office of Special Investigations was the Nazi war crimes unit of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, giving Loftus an insider's history and vantage point as to how the United States Department of Justice obstructed Congress, by aiding and abetting ex-Nazis.

Loftus states in "America's Nazi Secrets" that his first assignment as a federal prosecutor attached to the Office of Special Investigations, was to help build cases against several Byelorussians who had been admitted to the United States and allowed to become citizens, despite strong evidence that they were guilty of war crimes. This book is riveting, reading like Ludlum's spy novel, "The Matarese Circle!"

He indicates that he never wanted to be a Nazi hunter when he grew up, being like most kids from the Irish Catholic neighborhoods of Boston, he knew little about the Holocaust and less about covert operations. They didn't teach those subjects at Boston Latin, Boston College or at Law school, where he matriculated. Quite frankly, Loftus indicated that at the time he could care less. He says that when President Jimmy Carter asked the Justice Department in 1979 to set up an Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to see if there were any Nazis hiding in America, he thought it was a joke. He, like most federal attorneys working in Washington around that time, thought that a Nazi war crimes investigation would be a bit dated. Rhetorically speaking, why re-open criminal cases against seventy-year-old men for crimes that had taken place outside the United States decades before? He ended up being the first person in forty years to review the classified archives of U.S. Intelligence. His job was to look in the old files for leads on any Nazis hiding in America. He got more than he bargained for when he went to Suitland, a little town just outside Washington, D.C., where the Government's secrets are buried, literally. There are twenty vaults underground; each vault is one acre in size, crammed floor to ceiling with classified files.

He indicated in his book that the State Department's classified files were worse, stating that they warned President Truman in writing that he must never allow the Jews to have their own country because it would be a "communist puppet state within three years." Of course, we all know differently now! Loftus further indicated that he had never realized that there was official anti-Semitism in the government of the United States.

Loftus states in his book that in 1985, three years after he had appeared on "60 Minutes" to expose Nazis working for US intelligence, the Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration finally decided it was safe to hold Congressional hearings, but without notice to the press or public. He further stated that the Justice Department had directly threatened him with disbarment if he disclosed what he knew about any living Nazi working for US or British intelligence.

Loftus, would speak of a Frank G. Wisner in his book as not quite looking like a "spymaster," balding and fleshy although he was not yet forty, he appeared to those who greeted him upon his arrival in West Germany in the summer of 1948 like the prosperous Wall Street lawyer he had been. He spoke with a trace of the soft accent of his native Mississippi, and his official title, Director of Policy Coordination, was innocuous, having chosen it himself for that very reason, according to Loftus. Wisner was a veteran practitioner of the black art of covert operations, and the newly organized OPC was in the front line of the secret war against the Soviet Union.

Wisner came to Germany at a time when Europe seemed on the brink of revolutionary upheaval. Berlin was under blockade by the Soviets and depended upon a tenuous airlift for its survival. The Communists were actively trying to overthrow the governments of Greece and Turkey, according to Loftus' book. Italy was on the verge of going communist. A Russian attempt to pinch off a piece of northern Iran was repulsed. Half of Europe had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. To meet the challenge of Soviet expansion, President Harry S. Truman had made substantial amounts of military and economic assistance available to nations facing internal and external communist threats. "Our policy [is] to support the cause of freedom wherever it is threatened," he declared.

In 1948, many believed that a Soviet attack on Western Europe was imminent, as stated in "America's Nazi Secret." According to one retired government official, the entire American intelligence community was put on a war footing. Wisner's job was to plan an underground network of commando units to slow down the Communist advance, and then to guide allied forces in an invasion. To serve as the nucleus of his guerrilla forces, and to spearhead the invasion, Wisner would recruit those Nazi collaborators who had performed similar duties only a few years earlier for the Third Reich. Thus, the premise to "America's Nazi Secret!" Wisner was ordered to use his underground agents to overthrow the Communist-imposed governments, if possible, without overt American intervention. This is not too unlike what we did with the Contras and our once cozy relationship with the Shah of Iran, where it serves our immediate and best interests. To accomplish these goals, Loftus states that Wisner was hired by the State Department as head of the Office of Policy Coordination. This, perhaps, could be given as some twisted logic or justification for allowing known ex-Nazis, some known to have commited atrocities, to enter our country.

Loftus refers in his book to a "sickening scandal." He speaks of a Stanislaw Stankievich, "an educated man, a Doctor of Humanities." Yet, after assisting the Nazis with the invasion of White Russia, and being appointed to several government posts, his first task was to take his police force of local White Russian volunteers, without any help from the Germans, massacre all 8,000 Jews in a certain town on a single day. Stankievich had his policemen order the Jews to lie on top of each other in the graves, head to toe. That way, Stankievich could cram more bodies in and his troops could save ammunition by shooting through two layers of people at once, all according to Loftus' "America's Nazi Secret."

Loftus sums up his reasons for following up with his earlier written "The Belarus Secret," by stating in "America's Nazi Secret,": "Many years from now, our children will finally see these documents in the National Archives and ask us why we did nothing when the Nazis were still alive. I fear that we shall have to give them Dante's answer: that the seventh circle of hell is reserved for those who had the ability to prevent evil but did nothing. Our children deserve a better than that. But the time for justice is running out, and I am left alone."