The Nazis Next Door: Eric Lichtblau on How the CIA & FBI Secretly Sheltered Nazi War Criminals

[deutsey]

Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau’s new book unveils the secret history of how the United States became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Lichtblau first broke the story in 2010, based on newly declassified documents. Now, after interviews with dozens of agents for the first time, he has published his new book, "The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men."


Part II is here: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/31/part_2_eric_lichtblau_on_the

[JDPriestly]

1. Remember this next time you criticize Israel.

Even the friends of the Jewish people are not their friends in many cases.

Anti-semitism is inexplicable to me, but it is far more common and far better organized than you would believe.

[bpollen]

2. When you consider...

...that I was aware of this moral cesspool of devil's bargain in the early 1970's, it's hardly something that Lichtblau "broke." This might have more flesh on the bones, but the skeleton of the story has probably been around at least since the '60s.

[deutsey]

3. The new thing he's reporting on is a Justice Dept. report from a few years ago

AMY GOODMAN: But even the piece that started you on this journey, Eric Lichtblau, in 2010 was about a report coming out that had been censored right until most recently.

ERIC LICHTBLAU: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why right through until these last few years the U.S. has refused to give this out? And the man who had campaigned to his death bed to have it released—it was a CIA report?

ERIC LICHTBLAU: True. No, it was a Justice Department report. But as you say, it was kept under wraps for about five years. It was written in the mid-2000s. And I first got onto this, and really what started the book was that I got a tip that there was this exhaustive internal report at the Justice Department that looked at the efforts to go after the Nazis, and the Justice Department was sitting on the report. They had refused to release this publicly for very mysterious reasons. And I was able to get a hold of it and did a story on that. And I think even before I finished writing the story, I thought, you know, the material was so rich and so troubling that I wanted to try and do a book on it, because it really—it exposed both the successes of prosecutors in later years in going after these guys, but also really the just perverse relationships that the government had with a lot of these guys going back to the 1950s and 1960s. And that was something that the Justice Department did not want out there publicly.