It’s rightly understood that Jewish émigrés fleeing Nazism during WWII greatly enriched America’s arts and sciences, from Hollywood to higher education. It’s less acknowledged that at the end of the war, we also embraced Nazis and whitewashed their pasts to boost defense, space and technology programs. The chief example is NASA kingpin Wernher von Braun (see here and here), but there were a great many others. The opening of Richard Rashke’s new Daily Beast article “America’s Shameful Nazi Past“:
“The Nazi-hunting era that began with the thunder of a kettle drum at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 ended with a whimper in 2011. After a much interrupted two-year trial, a federal court in Munich convicted John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker, of assisting in the deaths of 29,060 mostly Dutch Jews at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in eastern Poland. The court sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he posed no flight risk, it allowed him to live in a nursing home while his appeal wound its way through German courts.
Demjanjuk died before his appeal process was completed. Therefore, under German law, he is considered not guilty of a war crime and his criminal record in Germany has been expunged. After being hounded through courts in the United States, Israel, and Germany for more than 30 years, Demjanjuk stands guilty of only one crime—lying under oath on his 1951 visa application about his birth country and what he did during World War II.
In the two visa fraud cases the U.S. Department of Justice eventually brought against Demjanjuk, a federal court ruled that he had been trained as an SS guard at Trawniki, a Nazi camp not far from Sobibor, and that he had served as a Nazi death camp guard. But no U.S. criminal court actually tried Demjanjuk for any war crimes because it did not have jurisdiction to do so.
The Demjanjuk case illustrates America’s historical and schizophrenic treatment of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. On the one hand, the United States aggressively tried some of them at Nuremberg, and deported others like Demjanjuk, who had acquired U.S. visas by fraud, granting extradition rights to those countries who wanted to try them. On the other hand, the United States hired, used, and protected several thousand Nazi war criminals and collaborators for scientific and espionage purposes. The use and shielding of these criminals for more than 50 years was and is a massive obstruction of Holocaust justice.”
Tags: John Demjanjuk, Richard Rashke