Q&A With Erich Lichtblau

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau visited the Law School this month for a talk on his new book, “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.” Lichtblau sat down with me after the presentation to talk Nazi hunting, shady Cold War deals, and World War II mysteries yet to be solved.

1. Fifteen Minutes: In your book, you reveal the myriad Nazi affiliates who gamed the system or were willingly admitted into the U.S., some going on to serve in the CIA and FBI. Can you talk a little bit about the impetus for your research, and is it more possible now than in the past because of declassification of records?

Eric Lichtblau: The start of it was a story I did for the newspaper in 2010, on this internal history at the Justice Department of Nazi hunting efforts, and I just thought the material was so fascinating and there was so much in there that I hadn’t known, that I wanted to get deeper into.... So, I started examining a lot of the files and interviewing the people who were still alive and the declassified files were critical. In 1999, Congress ordered the CIA and other intelligence agencies to begin declassifying their war crimes files, not only on the Nazis, but on the Japanese and their relationship with various war criminals, and that took years and years to get that stuff forced out. The CIA really resisted for a long time. But in the end, there’s this whole treasure trove of files, literally millions of pages of it.... It really is kind of a unique window into the relationships with these guys as they were going on, and you really see all the raw, sort of reprehensible stuff in some cases with these guys, talking about “so-and-so was under the control of the Gestapo, but he’d make a good spy,” and there was another guy where they say, “we think this guy, this SS officer, was probably guilty of minor war crimes, but whatever, we’ll use him anyway.” You don’t get to see that kind of stuff that often.

2. FM: In the book, you talk a lot about the meetings and subsequent alliance between [American spy and future CIA director] Allen Dulles and [Nazi general] Karl Wolff, and obviously there were other similar alliances. It seems like there’s a kind of indifference, or turning of the other cheek with this kind of dealing. How do you explain that indifference, or these kind of imaginary classifications of “moderate” or “less ardent” Nazis?

EL: You know, I think it was all about the Cold War. It was all about thinking that these guys could help us in this new war against the Soviets. It was the feeling of a lot of the intelligence guys that no one hated the Soviets more than the Nazis. They’d been fighting them for years, they were militarily opposed, they were ideologically opposed, and we needed to somehow put that hatred to use and exploit them. I mean obviously I think it was shortsighted to put it mildly. It was sort of morally repugnant, and even as a national security matter, in many of these cases only did damage, it didn’t help us in terms of gathering intelligence. With the scientists, you can see how they brought us a benefit—I’d like to think that, you know, I’m not an engineer, but I’d like to think that American scientists could have gotten us to the moon too, maybe it would have been 1971 or ’72, but we wouldn’t have been using Nazis to do it. So we made a deal with the Devil, a Faustian bargain and compromised a lot of our ideals to do it.

3. FM: A lot of people know about Wernher von Braun and Project Paperclip, but in your book you talk about sort of a deeper, darker side of this effort. Can you explain some of that?

EL: Yeah, I think the conventional wisdom is, “Oh, these guys were Nazis in name only, they weren’t really involved in anything dark or notorious,” but in fact many of them were directly involved in the running of this horrible slave labor factory, at Mittelwerk, Dora, in the medical experimentation, like [Nazi collaborator and later Project Paperclip scientist Hubertus] Strughold. These were not just sort of guys in white lab coats who had nothing to do with what was going on.

4. FM: What do you think is the biggest new idea, piece of information, or perspective that your book adds to this story?

EL: Well, I have two answers to that. From a sort of newsworthy perspective, I think the newest stuff is a lot of the depth of this relationship these intelligence agencies had with known Nazi figures, and the lengths that they went to to cover up those relationships for years and years even into the ’80s and ’90s.… The thing that most people seem the most surprised about was the conditions of the survivors in the displaced persons camps that I talk about in the early chapters. And that was certainly eye-opening to me, the idea that history remembers the liberation of the camps, at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and in fact many of these people lived for months, sometimes years, behind barbed wire and under armed guard, under horrible, horrible conditions, with General Patton running the camps in the early period, a raging anti-Semite; that I think has been completely lost to history. I’d like to think that the book does some good in correcting the historical record.

5. FM: It seems like there’s a huge disconnect between either publicly stated goals or at least the image that we have of that period now, and what actually happened. How do you account for that huge disconnect?

EL: That’s a great question. I think some of it was intentional. You hate to see the sinister side of our government, but unfortunately we do, and I think a lot of it was intentional, especially in those early years through the ’50s and ’60s. And I think some of it is just ignorance and apathy by the public.

6. FM: Can you talk briefly about Lileikis and the Massachusetts connection?

EL: He was the guy who worked for the CIA after being in Lithuania as a top, top Nazi collaborator. He was the guy who was signing orders rounding up thousands and thousands of Jews and turning them over to the Gestapo, and Eli Rosenbaum, a former Harvard Law student, goes to knock on [Lileikis’] door in, I think it was Norwood, outside of Boston, in the early ’80s, and says, “Were you the guy who ran the Lithuanian secret service police?” And he admits, “Yeah, I did, but you know, I don’t know what my men did, they may have done all sorts of horrible things in my name, and show me something that I signed.” It was only after the archives in the Soviet Union started to open up in the late ’80s and the early ’90s that a Justice Department historian, Mike McQueen, was able to actually find documents with his signature on it...and then they were able to go back to him and nail him. That was a case, also, where the CIA was actively really trying to cover it up. They told the Justice Department, “You can’t bring this case because he was one of ours, and it’s going to really bring out a lot of classified information.” They lied to Congress about what they knew about him, in their own files, in those declassified war crimes files I talked about. There were files saying that he was under the control of the Gestapo, that he was probably involved in mass murders of Jews at Vilnius, but we’re going to use him as a spy anyway. And you had the CIA covering that up, even in the 1990s. 50 years after the war, they were covering that up. Which seems particularly shameful. They were covering up a prior generation’s sins.

7. FM: You’ve mentioned there’s still some classified documents in this area that you’d like to see. What kind of information do you think they hold?

EL: I can only guess, but I would think that they name the names of the top intelligence officials who were aware of these kinds of things…. So far, I guess the holy grail would be if there was a policy approved for actively recruiting the Nazi spies. So far what’s in the paperwork is individual cases, okay, “Here’s this network of Nazi guys, we’ll use them; here’s this Nazi guy, we’ll use him.” There’s no single policy saying like there is with the scientists for Paperclip, to say, “Let’s go out and find a thousand Nazi spies.” Maybe, who knows, maybe that’s buried in there somewhere. With Allen Dulles’ signature on it.

8. FM: Do you think we’ll continue to prosecute surviving Nazi collaborators?

EL: You know it is unfortunately a little bit “too little, too late,” because these are the low-ranking guys who are on their deathbed.  You wish that this had happened 30, 40 years earlier, when the people who were culpable at the highest levels. Lileikis, the Boston guy, you wish that he didn’t live out his best years in the United States, in Boston, or that von Bolswhing didn’t live out his best years in New York, or many others like them. It’s some measure of justice, but not a lot.