How Real Nazis Came to the Americas: the Recruitment of Klaus Barbie
Jeff St. Clair details how NAZIs escaped justice to serve the rich and powerful...
How Real Nazis Came to the Americas: the Recruitment of Klaus Barbie
BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Counterpunch.org, Feb. 26, 2021
By the time Klaus Barbie went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, Klaus Barbie had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. Barbie sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo in Lyons, France, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin. ) After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before Allies moved into Germany.
Yet the career of this heinous war criminal scarcely skipped a beat before he found himself securing entered on the US payroll in postwar Germany. The Barbie was shipped out of Europe by his new paymasters along the “ratline’ to Bolivia. There he began a new life remarkably similar to his old one: working for the secret police, doing the bidding of drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking across South America. Soon, his old skills as a torturer became in high demand.
By the early 1960s, Barbie was once again working with the CIA to put a US-backed thug in power. In the years that followed, the old Nazi became a central player in the US-inspired Condor Program, aimed at suppressing popular insurgencies and keeping US-controlled dictators in power throughout Latin America. Barbie helped organize the so-called “Cocaine Coup” of 1980, when a junta of Bolivian generals seized power, slaughtering their leftist opponents and reaping billions in the cocaine, boom, in which Bolivia was a prime supplier.
All this time, Klaus Barbie was one of the most wanted men on the planet. Even so, Barbie flourished until 1983, when he was finally returned to France to face trial for his crimes. In the whole sordid history of collusion between US intelligence agencies, fascists and criminals, no one more starkly represents the evils of such partnerships than Klaus Barbie.
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/26/how-real-nazis-came-to-the-americas-the-recruitment-of-klaus-barbie/
No wonder Trump calls them, “fine people.” He has a lot in common with NAZIs: In addition to a love money and power, he and his followers also hate liberals and democracy.
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The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146
Edited by Tamara Feinstein
February 4, 2005
Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB."
The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.
This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:
• "I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman
• "I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste
• "Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer
The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.
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http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm
...whose work led to death of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., who died trying to destroy the V-2 launch sites, and then got the United States to the moon.
From the Jewish Virtual Library:
Operation Paperclip (also Project Paperclip) was the code name for the O.S.S.–U.S. Military rescue of scientists from Nazi Germany, during the terminus and aftermath of World War II. In 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established with direct responsibility for effecting Operation Paperclip.
Following the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed Operation Barbarossa), and (to a lesser extent) the entry of the U.S. into the war, the strategic position of Germany was at a disadvantage since German military industries were unprepared for a long war. As a result, Germany began efforts in spring 1943 to recall scientists and technical personnel from combat units to places where their skills could be used in research and development:
“Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.” — Dieter K. Huzel
The recalling first required identifying the men, then tracking them and ascertaining their political correctness and reliability, before being recorded to the Osenberg List, by Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineer-scientist, head of the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (Military Research Association). In March 1945, a Polish laboratory technician found the pieces of the Osenberg List in an improperly flushed toilet. Major Robert B. Staver, U.S.A., Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance, London, used the Osenberg List to compile his Black List of scientists to be interrogated, headed by rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
The original, unnamed plan — to interview only the rocket scientists — changed after Maj. Staver sent Col. Joel Holmes’s cable to the Pentagon, on 22 May 1945, about the urgency of evacuating the German technicians and their families as “important for [the] Pacific war”. Most of the scientists were rocketeers of the V-2 rocket service; initially housed with their families in Landshut, Bavaria.
On 19 July 1945, the U.S. JCS designated the handling of the Nazi scientists and their families as Operation Overcast, but when their housing’s nickname, “Camp Overcast”, became common, conversational usage, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip. Despite the effort to secrecy, by 1958, much about Operation Paperclip was mainstream knowledge, mentioned in a panegyric Time magazine article about Wernher von Braun.
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https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/operation-paperclip
Nazis and the Republican Party
Carla Binion
Online Journal, Jan. 28, 2000
EXCERPT...
Christopher Simpson writes in “Blowback” that in 1983, Ronald Reagan presented a Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, to CIA émigré program consultant James Burnham. Burnham was a psychological warfare consultant who promoted something called "liberationism." Just before the 1952 election, the CIA worked up a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign aimed at selling Americans on expanding cold war activities in Europe. Part of the guiding theory (given the name "liberationism"
was the idea that certain Nazi leaders from World War II should be brought in as "freedom fighters" against the USSR.
Reagan said that Burnham's ideas on liberation "profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world," adding, "I owe [Burnham] a personal debt, because throughout the years of travelling on the mashed-potato circuit I have quoted [him] widely." Reagan may not have known Burnham's theories were based on his work on projects that enlisted many Nazi collaborators, but it seems that Reagan's CIA Director Casey or former CIA Director, Vice President George Bush, would have informed him.
At a May 9, 1984 press conference, Simon Wiesenthal said, "Nazi criminals were the principal beneficiaries of the Cold War." The cold war mentality, hyped by Reinhard Gehlen and other Nazis, became the shelter for tens of thousands of Nazi criminals. Helping the far right in this country to promote cold war hysteria became the Nazi war criminals "reason for being." As Christopher Simpson says, the cold war became those criminals' means "to avoid responsibility for the murders they had committed."
Journalist Seymour Hersh says Christopher Simpson's “Blowback” is "the ultimate book about the worst kind of cold war thinking, in which some of our most respected statesmen made shameful decisions that they mistakenly believed to be justified." To this day, says Simpson, the U. S. intelligence agencies hide the scope of their post-World War II collaboration with Nazi criminals.
Are Republicans like George H. W. Bush, Oliver North, and Jesse Helms aware they have been assisted by Nazi collaborators? Bush once worked for the CIA and should have known about the nature of the Nazis in his '88 campaign. No doubt he knows the history of Nazi/CIA collaboration. Whether or not Bush knew of the fascists' involvement in his campaign, the Republican Party should have done a far better screening job. One thing is certain: The intelligence agencies know the scope and extent of Nazi involvement with the political right in this country. It is a shame they keep it hidden from the majority of the American people.
SOURCE:
https://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2005/02/nazis_and_the_r.html
Mr. Establishment, for one.
The Real McCloy
THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. McCLOY; The Making of the American Establishment,
By Kai Bird (Simon & Schuster: $30; 800 pp.)
By ROBERT SHERRILL
APRIL 19, 1992 12 AM PT
SHERRILL IS CORPORATIONS CORRESPONDENT FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE
EXCERPT...
When McCloy took over as high commissioner of defeated Germany, he talked a tough line about crushing the many still- active Nazis. But he promptly turned to mush, permitting Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to fill his cabinet with notorious antisemites and Nazi war criminals (some of whom became McCloy’s personal friends). McCloy also vastly expanded the shameful programs begun before he got to Germany, of letting some of the worst war criminals off the hook.
He commuted two-thirds of the death sentences of mass murderers (such as the SS officer who personally executed 1,500 Jews) and radically reduced the prison sentences of doctors who had conducted experiments on death-camp inmates, of high-ranking Nazi Judges who had administered Gestapo justice, and of industrialists who had built the Nazi war machine.
McCloy freed some immediately, including Alfred Krupp, whose munitions factories had worked thousands of slave laborers to death. Krupp’s original sentence had included loss of all property; McCloy canceled that punishment and within a few years Krupp was again one of the richest industrialists in the world. Obviously McCloy’s obsequiousness toward money and power made him the wrong man to reform Nazi Germany. “Though he could understand the special culpability of the ‘big Nazis,’ ” Bird writes, “when it came to a wealthy and politically well-connected man like Krupp, he suspended his good judgment.”
As high commissioner, McCloy dabbled disastrously in the intelligence business, setting up a network of agents in Germany that included the likes of Klaus Barbie, who had shipped 78,000 French Jews to the gas chambers, and Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who had been responsible for some of the “grisliest mass killings on the Eastern Front.” Not surprisingly, many of the intelligence operations carried out under McCloy were, says Bird, “fiascos.”
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-19-bk-588-story.html
Mr. McCloy was joined by another “Mr. Establishment” type with extensive ties to wealthy NAZI industrialists and anti-communist NAZI spy rings, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, in service on the Warren Commission. Coincidentally.