Eric Lichtblau reports today on the revelations that America accepted and hid Nazis -- gave them "safe haven" -- at the end of World War II. This is not a revelation to many of us. As the nuclear industry began to grow at the end of the war America welcomed Germans who had been involved in their own nation's fledgling nuclear experiments. So the headline in the Times seems a little out of date. What's new?
...The report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.
The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said. ...NYT
There's no question but that our nuclear and space explorations gained a good deal from turning a blind eye towards German scientists who had also been involved in the "purge" of Jews, in employing slave labor, and, of course, who had held membership in the SS.
The scandal about America's easy acceptance of Nazi collaborators is not the real problem now. The real problem is how long official Washington has taken to reveal the details of what happened.
The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.
The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were...
...The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records.
And then there's the American "Jewish problem," which we don't like to talk about. America was intensely antisemitic, often very admiring of what the Germans were doing to "eliminate the problem" and frequently did more than merely ostracize Jews from positions of power and memberships in country clubs.
Official Washington was comfortable with its own antisemitism. Jews were hired but given secondary roles and often played the role of scapegoat in accounting and other agency scandals. When we look back at that chilling time -- when we have to face the other side of America's intervention in the war -- it's hardly surprising that secrecy and shame are still features of decision-making at top levels of our government. Given all that (and more, too), "transparency" seems like some golden land of wishful thinking.
