Book summary “The Nazis next door”: summary

Introduction

You live in a country that proudly proclaims itself a safe haven for the persecuted, yet you might be surprised to learn that thousands of Nazi war criminals found a welcoming home in American neighborhoods after World War II. While Holocaust survivors languished in squalid displaced persons camps, American intelligence and immigration agencies systematically protected, recruited, and harbored men who orchestrated mass murder.

Eric Lichtblau reveals how the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department prioritized anti-Soviet espionage and technological dominance over justice, shielding perpetrators behind walls of secrecy. You will discover how these men built ordinary suburban lives, blending into communities while hiding dark pasts of brutality.

The book traces this systemic betrayal across five major areas:

• How inept immigration screenings and underground rat lines allowed war criminals to enter the United States.
• Why American intelligence partnered with high-ranking Nazi officers through initiatives like Project Paperclip.
• How the CIA recruited ex-SS officers for anti-Communist operations while dismissing wartime atrocities.
• How courageous early activists and journalists exposed these hidden Nazis despite official obstruction.
• How German scientists achieved immense cultural prominence in America while whitewashing their lethal pasts.

1. Liberation and the Inept Immigration Screenings

Following World War II, Holocaust survivors remained imprisoned in the same camps under harsh conditions. Their former Nazi tormentors often received preferential treatment or evaded capture.

While Allied forces kept Holocaust survivors in harsh displaced persons camps, inept U.S. immigration screening and underground rat lines allowed thousands of Nazi war criminals to enter America.

Displaced Persons Camps and Rat Lines

While Allied forces liberated concentration camps, survivors were kept in restrictive displaced persons camps. These sites suffered from poor hygiene, inadequate food, and former Nazi medical personnel or guards still running parts of the facilities. An official report by Earl Harrison compared the treatment of Jews in these camps to Nazi methods minus the extermination.

Jacob Biber, a Ukrainian Jewish survivor, suffered confinement at the American DP camp at Föhrenwald. Conditions were so bleak that many desperate survivors died by suicide. Out of seven million stateless persons, the United States admitted forty thousand people in the first three years after the war.

The Vatican and the Red Cross actively facilitated the escape of fleeing Nazi war criminals through underground rat lines to South America and elsewhere based on shared anti-Communist sentiments. Catholic clergy, notably Bishop Alois Hudal, provided travel documents, shelter, and safe passage for fascists and Nazis seeking to evade justice. They viewed them as valuable anti-Communist allies and potential converts.

Bishop Alois Hudal, known as the Brown Bishop, proved prolific in shepherding Nazis to safety. He organized escape routes utilized by high-ranking war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. A secret State Department cable from 1947 detailed the Vatican as the largest organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants.

The Influx of Nazi Scientists and Baltic Collaborators

The United States military actively recruited and sheltered over a thousand Nazi scientists and doctors, bypassing official bans on ardent Nazis to exploit their technological expertise. Through top-secret programs like Project Paperclip, American intelligence and military agencies granted visas, homes, and research positions to former Third Reich specialists who had utilized slave labor, actively cleansing their war records.

Wernher von Braun, a committed Nazi who used slave labor to build V-2 rockets, transitioned smoothly from a luxury ski chalet in the Alps to becoming an honored American scientist in Huntsville, Alabama. Front-door recruitment programs brought one thousand six hundred Nazi scientists and doctors into the United States.

U.S. immigration policies heavily favored refugees from the Baltic states. These policies inadvertently welcomed thousands of collaborators and Nazi death squad members who easily integrated into American society. Policymakers and screeners viewed Baltic immigrants as industrious and of good stock while rejecting Jewish applicants. This allowed numerous local police chiefs, ghetto liquidators, and concentration camp guards to enter under false pretenses.

Early post-war U.S. visas set aside forty percent of all allocations for war refugees from the Baltics. Andrija Artukovic, a top cabinet minister in the Nazi puppet government of Croatia responsible for massive imprisonments and murders, entered the United States under a fake name and lived near Los Angeles for nearly forty years. He was known as the Butcher of the Balkans, having reportedly ordered six hundred thousand of his countrymen murdered or imprisoned.

Nazi SS members and war criminals easily obtained American visas by omitting their wartime service and posing as ordinary refugees or forced laborers. U.S. immigration screening was thoroughly inept, allowing perpetrators of atrocities to slip through the system by fabricating benign biographies. Interviewers actively coached applicants to omit mention of SS service or concentration camp work.

Jakob Reimer entered the United States in 1952 by falsely claiming to be a German POW who worked an office job. He omitted his service as a decorated SS officer and Trawniki training guard. By 1998, Jakob Reimer dismissed his past by stating it was all forgotten.

2. Cold War Espionage and Project Paperclip

American intelligence agencies partnered with high-ranking Nazi officers and recruited over a thousand German scientists, prioritizing technological dominance and anti-communist espionage over justice.

Alliances with Nazi Officials

You discover that American intelligence prioritized anti-communist espionage over justice. Spy agencies partnered with high-ranking Nazi officials who offered intelligence on the Soviet Union.

Allen Dulles met secretly by a fireplace in Zurich with SS General Karl Wolff in March 1945 to discuss a separate surrender in Italy and future operations against the Soviet Union.

Despite Wolff's role in massacres, American spy agencies protected him and many other SS officers from Nuremberg war crimes prosecution. 185,000 American soldiers lost their lives fighting in Europe during WWII.

4,000 ethnic Germans were deported from Latin America to be imprisoned as enemy aliens in the US. General Wolff acquired 3 million shares of equity in Italian companies.

The War Department brought German rocket scientists, doctors, and engineers to the United States under Project Paperclip. Military officials systematically dismissed background checks, papered over Nazi party affiliations, and prioritized technical expertise over moral culpability or war crimes involvement.

General George Patton enthusiastically hired Nazi camp administrators and met with V-2 rocket mastermind Walter Dornberger, handing him cigars in admiration.

1,600 German scientists were brought to America under Project Paperclip. 24,000 German candidates were drawn up on the initial military recruitment list. Professional recruits in America were paid 6 dollars a day.

The technological breakthroughs of Hitler's V-2 rocket program were built on the extreme brutality and mass murder of concentration camp slave laborers. The underground facility Dora-Mittelwerk relied on tens of thousands of prisoners from nearby camps who were starved, tortured, and hanged for perceived sabotage while working on ballistic missiles under German scientists.

French prisoner Michel Fliecx recounted being sent to the dysentery room amid skeletons and foul stench when he fell ill at the rocket factory. 20 or so prisoners died every day from diseases in the tunnels.

As Cold War tensions escalated, American occupation authorities yielded to West German pressure and commuted the sentences of convicted Nazi war criminals. John McCloy announced in January 1951 that he was sparing twenty-one Nazi war criminals from execution and shortening the prison terms of dozens more.

In the first four years after the war, 277 German war criminals were tried and executed by the US. 700 others were imprisoned in that same period.

The Gehlen Spy Ring and Domestic Protection

American intelligence agencies funded and operated a vast espionage network in Europe headed by former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen, employing numerous unrepentant war criminals. Operating under code names like Operation Rusty, thousands of agents under Gehlen spied on Soviet movements by monitoring radio traffic and laying surveillance cables, while American handlers shielded them from any accountability.

Reinhard Gehlen went on a red-carpet tour of America in 1951 that included attending a World Series game at Yankee Stadium while continuing to withhold the real names of his operatives.

4,000 agents operated under Reinhard Gehlen spying for the Americans. 100 or more agents had clear ties to Nazi atrocities in Gehlen's group. The US paid a half-million dollars a year to Gehlen's group in the early postwar years.

The reliance on ex-Nazi spies frequently backfired as figures utilized by the CIA turned out to be incompetent, fraudulent, or active double agents for the Soviet Union. Wilhelm Höttl, a senior SD officer and witness at Nuremberg, was recruited by Allen Dulles for anti-Soviet espionage in Austria. Höttl provided bogus intelligence, embezzled American funds, and acted as a secret Soviet double agent before being dropped.

Army officials paid a source $3,000 in Austrian shillings for intelligence documents, only to discover that their own spy Höttl was the one marketing the secret papers.

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI actively protected Nazi collaborators and informants inside the United States, dismissing war crimes allegations as Soviet propaganda. Hoover viewed domestic Cold War politics through an anti-communist lens, intervening to halt deportation proceedings and scuttle investigations into foreign-born extremists who provided the bureau with information.

Hoover blocked an FBI agent from testifying about Laszlo Agh's admissions regarding the Arrow Cross Party, effectively killing the deportation case against him in Newark.

3. Intelligence Recruitment and Minor War Crimes

The CIA willingly recruited ex-SS officers for anti-Communist operations, dismissing their brutal wartime atrocities in the Caucasus as minor infractions while tolerating rampant agent deception.

Recruiting the Hot War Cadre

During the Cold War, the CIA prioritized intense antagonism toward Communism above all else. Handlers reasoned that a recruit's hidden Nazi background and fear of exposure could be leveraged to ensure absolute loyalty to American intelligence. You see this logic at work when agencies built a hot war cadre from former enemies.

Tom Soobzokov, a former SS officer who spoke five languages and hated the Soviets, was recruited by the CIA in 1952, given the code name Nostril, and later brought to the United States to join a secret anti-Communist team. His starting pay in the Middle East was $150 a month, which later rose to $600 a month as a member of the CIA's Hot War team. Intelligence interviewers concluded that Soobzokov was likely hiding participation in unsavory activities that could be categorized under minor war crimes, deciding this was of no consequence to his hiring.

Intelligence agencies rationalized and minimized the wartime atrocities committed by their foreign recruits, categorizing them as acceptable run-of-the-mill violations. When polygraph tests and background checks revealed that a recruit had engaged in brutal activities for the Third Reich, American handlers dismissed these as ordinary infractions rather than major disqualifiers, coining dismissive terms to justify their continued employment.

The Nazi occupation of the North Caucasus involved systematic extermination campaigns carried out with the active assistance of local collaborators. Hitler's forces, accompanied by mobile SS execution squads and Gestapo units in poison green uniforms, implemented scorched-earth tactics and mass murder to eliminate Jews and Communist partisans, utilizing local ethnic divisions and native informants.

During the six months of the Nazi occupation in the Krasnodar region, twenty thousand Jews were killed by Nazis in the North Caucasus alone. In Krasnodar, the Nazis packed local residents into airtight mobile death trucks known as killer of souls, packing eighty at a time and pumping carbon monoxide exhaust inside to murder roughly 6,700 victims out of an estimated one million strong total collaborators across Europe.

The first European Nazi war crimes trials were held by the Soviets before the war even ended, establishing the enduring defense argument used by collaborators. After reclaiming Krasnodar in 1943, Soviet authorities prosecuted eleven captured collaborators in a public trial inside a packed movie theater, resulting in eight collaborators convicted and sentenced to death during this hour of retribution. Eight out of eleven captured collaborators were convicted and publicly hanged from three wooden gallows in the town marketplace before thirty thousand spectators.

Deception and Termination of Spies

Intelligence recruits frequently constructed elaborate false biographies and life stories to impress their handlers, which agencies often failed to verify for years. Operatives exaggerated their military credentials, education, and wartime exploits to elevate their status. Even when confronted with glaring contradictions and failed polygraph exams, some agents managed to talk their way out of trouble by fabricating elaborate excuses or shifting blame onto personal rivals.

Tom Soobzokov maintained a multi-year web of lies regarding his military academy attendance and wartime role, taking seven polygraph tests over a few years. He even convinced his handlers that rumors of his misconduct were malicious lies spread by a rival angry over a deflowered bride, earning a reputation as an incorrigible fabricator.

Intelligence agencies ultimately terminated spies not for their historical war crimes, but for their inability to tell the unvarnished truth to their handlers. While agencies were willing to tolerate ex-Nazi backgrounds, continuous deception, unverified fabrications, and repeated lies during interrogations rendered an operative a liability who could no longer be trusted by his own organization.

After a two-day grilling in November 1959 where concrete Nazi documents surfaced proving Soobzokov had hunted down enemies and led an execution squad, the CIA formally cut ties with him, sending a final payment of $50.00 for services rendered sent to Soobzokov upon termination, after which the Nostril file burned.

4. Ex-Nazis in America and Early Activism

Former architects of Jewish persecution secured American sanctuary through intelligence cover, prompting courageous early activists and journalists to expose them despite FBI surveillance.

Otto von Bolschwing wrote Zum Judenproblem in 1937 at 28 years old. The text outlined economic restrictions and social isolation designed to make Germany unbearable for Jews and force their emigration. Adolf Eichmann later called this strategy the least of all evils compared to gas chambers. Von Bolschwing joined the SS and moved to Bucharest in 1941 where he backed the fascist Iron Guard.

The CIA repeatedly protected von Bolschwing, employing him as an anti-Soviet spy and helping him relocate to the United States while covering up his Nazi past. Recognizing his utility in gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union, American handlers overlooked his SS background, provided financial support, falsified visa documents, and secured his immigration to New York. The agency paid him $20,000 a year to run a spy network in Austria.

The CIA arranged for von Bolschwing and his wife to travel to America on the luxury cruise ship Andrea Doria in 1954 to avoid her fear of flying.

The 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina terrified von Bolschwing and forced the CIA into damage control to prevent public exposure. Fifteen years had passed since Eichmann escaped Allied custody. Fearing he would be the next target for abduction or trial, von Bolschwing turned to the CIA for protection. The agency forced him to withdraw from a prestigious State Department posting in India to avoid a public scandal.

Two former CIA handlers sat von Bolschwing down in New York City to deliver an ultimatum, forcing him to drop his job application or risk exposure of his SS ties.

Chuck Allen and the First Nazi Hunters

Chuck Allen, a Quaker journalist and activist, pioneered the public exposure of Nazi war criminals living openly in the United States during the early 1960s. Publishing exhaustive exposés in left-wing magazines, Allen cataloged the presence of ex-Nazis and collaborators in American cities, sparking intense controversy and organizing the first anti-Nazi protests in the country. Allen published a forty-two-page exposé in Jewish Currents in 1963 naming at least fifteen ex-Nazis living in America, including a Lithuanian bishop.

While Chuck Allen pursued Nazi fugitives, the FBI subjected him to extensive domestic surveillance under the suspicion that he was a dangerous Communist subversion agent. J. Edgar Hoover personally authorized monitoring Allen's activities, tapping his communications, infiltrating his organization, and maintaining thousands of pages of secret government files on him. Allen noticed he was being followed by government agents in a rental Plymouth Fury while meeting with an Eastern European source to discuss war crimes records.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal tracked former Majdanek guard Hermine Braunsteiner to Queens, New York, where she was living as an American housewife. Prompted by Holocaust survivors who remembered her extreme cruelty as Kobyla, Wiesenthal tracked her trail through Canada to New York, eventually tipping off journalists to expose her identity. The Majdanek death camp held an estimated 1.5 million Jews and other undesirables. Braunsteiner had served 3 years in prison in Austria after the war for her crimes.

New York Times reporter Joe Lelyveld knocked on doors in Queens, New York, and confronted Braunsteiner, who broke down and admitted her past as a camp guard.

5. Project Paperclip Elites and Sanitized Science

Top German scientists brought to the United States under Project Paperclip achieved unprecedented cultural and scientific prominence despite their Nazi pasts.

Wernher von Braun and Hubertus Strughold were among 1,600 German scientists brought to the U.S. after World War II. They became American scientific royalty, testifying before Congress, advising the military, and working closely with figures like Walt Disney while completely omitting their wartime complicity from public view.

Wernher von Braun appeared as an on-air expert in Walt Disney's popular 1950s television series about space exploration, promoting rockets without any mention of the slave labor used to build them. By 1953 when Eisenhower became president, von Braun and Strughold were living as scientific royalty. In 1957, Strughold met Walt Disney on the Queen Mary and Disney aired his space specials.

Scientific Royalty and Slave Labor

Wernher von Braun knowingly utilized thousands of concentration camp prisoners as slave labor to manufacture V-2 rockets under brutal conditions. Von Braun visited the Mittelwerk rocket plant approximately fifteen times and attended meetings to requisition more prisoners. Although twenty thousand prisoners died from disease, malnutrition, and executions at the missile factories, von Braun and his American admirers successfully downplayed these facts, framing the V-2 solely as a triumph of technological progress.

When questioned by West German prosecutors in a 1969 deposition in New Orleans, von Braun admitted he knew the SS used slave labor from the start and visited the plant fifteen times, though he claimed he never personally saw anyone killed. He had attended a meeting to request 1,800 prisoners.

Dachau Experiments and Political Protection

Dr. Hubertus Strughold participated in Nazi medical conferences where lethal hypothermia and altitude experiments on concentration camp prisoners were discussed. Nuremberg documents, including nearly a hundred pages of minutes from an October 1942 medical conference in Nuremberg, showed that Strughold attended, gave a presentation, and offered scientific commentary on cold-water research derived directly from deadly hypothermia tests conducted on prisoners at Dachau. He was mentioned by name 61 times at the medical trials at Nuremberg, and Document No. 401 implicated 13 doctors in human experimentation.

At the 1942 Luftwaffe medical conference, Strughold discussed ocean temperatures and encouraged researchers to obtain more precise data, effectively prompting further reliance on human guinea pigs. When assigned to compile Nazi aviation research into a two-volume review for the U.S. military titled German Aviation Medicine in World War II, Strughold deliberately edited out references explaining how the brutal studies and findings had been obtained. Stated simply, you can see how aviation medicine scientists systematically sanitized their research data by removing references to human experimentation.

Strughold compiled the two-volume review for his new American bosses at an air base in San Antonio, omitting the methods of torture used to gather data on high-altitude and cold-water survival. Frustrated by the INS's apathy toward Nazi war criminals compared to their eagerness to deport Communists and dissidents, former INS investigator Tony DeVito quit the agency and tipped off Chuck Allen about Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Allen then used Nuremberg war crimes documents to connect Strughold directly to human experiments after they met in San Antonio on November 23, 1974.

Political pressure from powerful American lawmakers quickly forced the Immigration and Naturalization Service to shut down its brief inquiry into Dr. Strughold. After a November 1974 New York Times article published on page 48 exposed Strughold's inclusion on a list of suspected Nazis under INS investigation, his powerful defenders in Congress and the Air Force intervened. Texas Congressman Henry González denounced the inquiry on the House floor, calling Strughold a distinguished scientist, and the INS abruptly closed the case without thorough investigation.

Intense public opposition to Nazi investigations also led to organized civilian counterintelligence tactics against the Justice Department. Believing there was an internal mole leaking confidential documents, the Justice Department called in the FBI. Investigators discovered that an immigrant opposition group was legally collecting all office trash from a dumpster and distributing internal memos to defense lawyers and relatives of the accused.

Immigrant groups like Americans for Due Process and the Latvian Truth Fund gathered discarded case reviews almost every workday for two years beginning in 1985, prompting the Office of Special Investigations to begin burning its trash.

• Burn office trash to prevent confidential documents from being harvested from dumpsters.

Conclusion

You see how Cold War expediency led American institutions to shelter thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators at the expense of justice. The CIA, the FBI, and immigration agencies traded moral integrity for tactical advantage. You also see how persistent journalists, survivor advocates, and dedicated prosecutors eventually pierced this institutional wall of silence.

To ensure that historical injustices are exposed and accountability prevails, you must follow these practical rules:

1. Demand full transparency from government intelligence and immigration archives instead of accepting secrecy in the name of national security.
2. Support investigative journalism and independent researchers who track down hidden records and give voice to forgotten victims.
3. Reject the false choice between security and justice because compromising fundamental human rights ultimately undermines the society you seek to protect.
4. Scrutinize how institutions handle uncomfortable historical compromises so that past cover-ups are neither repeated nor forgotten.

10 Key Ideas

1. Inept immigration screenings and underground rat lines allowed thousands of Nazi war criminals to enter America while Holocaust survivors languished in harsh displaced persons camps.
2. American intelligence agencies partnered with high-ranking Nazi officers and recruited over a thousand German scientists through Project Paperclip, prioritizing technological dominance and anti-Communist espionage over justice.
3. The CIA willingly recruited ex-SS officers for anti-Communist operations, dismissing their brutal wartime atrocities as minor infractions while tolerating rampant agent deception.
4. Former architects of Jewish persecution secured American sanctuary through intelligence cover, prompting courageous early activists and journalists to expose them despite FBI surveillance.
5. Top German scientists brought to the United States under Project Paperclip achieved unprecedented cultural and scientific prominence despite their Nazi pasts.
6. The children of accused men suffered immense emotional burdens and profound shock upon discovering their fathers' hidden pasts of brutality.
7. High-profile legal battles faced intense political obstruction, while tragic vigilante violence occasionally erupted amid the public exposure of hidden war criminals.
8. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI actively protected Nazi collaborators and informants inside the United States, dismissing war crimes allegations as Soviet propaganda.
9. Persistent journalists, survivor advocates, and dedicated prosecutors eventually pierced the institutional wall of silence that had long protected these perpetrators.
10. Government investigations ultimately confirmed that American institutions systematically sheltered thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators at the expense of justice.