“Useful Enemies”: U.S. Admitted Not Just Nazis After WWII, But Their Sadistic Collaborators

Why did the United States feel the need to admit Baltic and Eastern Europeans who at times exceeded the Nazis in brutality?

Lost count of the sordid episodes in America’s past? In Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals (Delphinium Books, 2013), Richard Rashke chronicles one that few of us know much about. Many Americans have heard of Operation Paperclip, the program run by the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA). After World War II, the United States made the cold calculation to recruit Nazi scientists both to secure their help in the Cold War and to keep Russia from acquiring their expertise.

Rashke explains that, even though the United States enacted the Displaced Persons Act and a special Displaced Persons Commission (DPC) to determine which European organizations’ members were to be denied U.S. visas

… it is safe to say that the United States used, protected, and opened the door to several thousand former SS and SD officers, Gestapo agents and chiefs, Abwehr intelligence officers, Nazi propagandists and scientists, Einsatzkommandos, Waffen SS volunteers, Vlasov’s army soldiers, Nazi quislings, and ethnic cleansers.  (more...)

“Useful Enemies”: U.S. Admitted Not Just Nazis After WWII, But Their Sadistic Collaborators