15 November 2010
A confidential report written in 2006 that chronicles the history of the US Justice Department’s special unit for the prosecution of Nazis accuses the post-war US government of making America a “safe haven” for several Nazi war criminals. Agents from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) found that war criminals "were indeed knowingly granted entry" to the US, even though government officials were aware of their pasts, the report concluded. "America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became in some small measure a safe haven for persecutors as well," the 600-page document, seen by the ‘New York Times’, says.
Earlier, the Justice Department had declared dozens of pages from the document off-limits to the public. The report provides new details of many of the major cases handled by OSI, a special unit of the Justice Department. The report reflects the ways in which the US officials assigned to recruit foreign scientists after the war circumvented President Truman's order not to bring in Nazi Party members or people who had actively supported Nazi militarism.
Arthur Rudolph, one of hundreds of scientists brought to the US after the war, told investigators in 1947 of attending a hanging during the war of inmates accused of sabotage at a slave labor plant manufacturing V2 rockets near Nordhausen, Germany, where he was operations director. US immigration officials knew Rudolph had been a Nazi party member, but he was admitted to the country anyway and went on to become honored in the US as the father of the Saturn V rocket, enabling the US to make its first manned moon landing. Rudolph went to Germany in 1984 and forfeited his US citizenship.
The report also details the posthumous pursuit by OSI of Josef Mengele (pictured on the left), the SS officer and physician at Auschwitz known as “Angel of Death”. A piece of Mengele’s scalp was kept in the drawer of an OSI director in the hope that it would establish whether he was still alive. Investigators used diaries and letters supposedly written by Mengele and German dental records to follow his trail. After the development of DNA, the piece of scalp helped to establish that Mengele had died in Brazil in 1979, without ever entering the US, according to the report.
In 1954, the CIA assisted Otto von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop plans "to purge Germany of the Jews". In a series of CIA memos, officials pondered what to do if von Bolschwing was confronted about his past, debating whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or "explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances", according to the report. The Justice Department sought to deport von Bolschwing after it learned in 1981of his Nazi past, but he died the same year.
Read the confidential OSI report on the website of the 'New York Times'.
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