Certainly the US claims to be a moral force for good in the world and representatives of the US shielded war criminals of the worst sort from receiving justice.
The US, of course, played a crucial role in defeating Nazi Germany. Over 400,000 Americans lost their lives in the war against Adolf Hitler. But there’s also a dark postscript to this story, one that began when World War II ended and one that we need to address now.
America’s been a haven for thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who served in concentration camps and death squads and SS units. Several were even leaders of Nazi-allied governments. And we didn’t merely take them in – in some cases, we welcomed and protected them; we kept them safe from justice. It’s far past time we acknowledged it.
Besides the obvious ethical reasons for historical honesty, there are also social ones. We’re in the middle of a heated national conversation fueled by a hunger for racial justice. But how can we hope to acknowledge the impact of centuries-old institutions like slavery and Jim Crow when we can’t be honest about coddling perpetrators of the Holocaust, which still has living eyewitnesses, victims and veterans? We can’t get to 1619 if we can’t get past 1945.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/24/opinions/dark-postscript-america-nazis-golinkin/index.htmlHow Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.
Of all the [Holocaust] survivors in the camps, only a few thousand came in in [the] first year or so. To get a visa was a precious commodity, and there were immigration policymakers in Washington who were on record saying that they didn't think the Jews should be let in because they were "lazy people" or "entitled people" and they didn't want them in.
But there were many, many thousands of Nazi collaborators who got visas to the United States while the survivors did not — even though they had been, for instance, the head of a Nazi concentration camp, the warden at a camp, or the secret police chief in Lithuania who signed the death warrants for people. ...
The bulk of the people who got into the United States — some were from Germany itself, some in fact were senior officers in the Nazi party under Hitler — but more were the Nazi collaborators.
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-nazis-were-rewarded-with-life-in-the-u-s
The History of Nazi Immigration to the U.S. Has Been Forgotten
Canada and the United States allowed and even encouraged the immigration of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators in the years following the war. If the public remembers this history, it is likely through the frame of fictional “Nazi hunting” narratives, like those featured in the Indiana Jones movies or the Amazon Prime show Hunters. Or perhaps we take note when a former Nazi makes the news, as in the case of former Cleveland resident and concentration camp guard Ivan “John” Demjanjuk.
But these narratives obscure the more typical stories of Nazis in North America, especially in the U.S. Our popular memory has downplayed the welcome offered to Nazi immigrants after the war, which is how Americans, like Canadians, have repeatedly blithely celebrated men from units accused of contributing to atrocities.
Near the end of the war, as Allied armies regained ground and began camp liberations, collaborators fled their posts in droves to avoid the violent reprisal that awaited them upon capture. This was particularly true for Eastern European collaborators, whose roles spanned from pogrom participation to auxiliary policing and SS membership. They could blend in among those displaced by the war more easily than Germans and Austrians, and then concoct plausible back stories that did not implicate them for their contributions to the Nazi cause. Those who made it to U.S. and British-administered Allied zones found that if they voiced fear of political retribution for anti-Soviet views, they could become eligible for emigration.
https://time.com/6322156/history-of-nazi-immigration/
Nazi-era war criminals often had safe haven in the United States
The re-opening of our borders in the years following World War II allowed thousands of collaborators and accomplices of the Nazi regime to make their way to the United States. A small number of them were knowingly brought in by U.S. intelligence services. Most came through the system undetected amid an influx of nearly 400,000 war-displaced persons. At the time, officials set a preposterously high bar for complicity in war crimes. That, combined with an initial lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, made it easy for applicants to cover up their backgrounds on their immigration forms.
Once here, it was as easy to escape justice. Adrija Artukovic, minister of the Interior and Justice in Croatia during the war, sneaked into the U.S. under an assumed name in 1948 and settled in Seal Beach. Known in Yugoslavia as the Butcher of the Balkans, Artukovic was described by a U.S. official as Croatia’s Himmler. American authorities knew he was here as early as 1949, but he wasn’t arrested and returned to Croatia for trial until the 1980s. His death sentence was never carried out; he died in 1988.
For the first two decades after World War II, the INS brought very few “denaturalization” cases to court, a total of five for the entire 1950s. Only one of these war criminals was successfully denaturalized. The 1960s saw just two cases pursued, despite INS being flooded with dozens if not hundreds of tips on potential war criminals living among us. The cases it did manage to bring to court in the 1950s and 1960s were so poorly constructed that even a Romanian Iron Guard member and virulent anti-Semite, Valerian Trifa, was not stripped of his citizenship. As for deportations, the INS filed no more than 10 cases against suspected war criminals from 1945 to 1973.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/ucla-faculty-voice:-nazi-era-war-criminals-often-had-safe-haven-in-the-united-states
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