Eric Lichtblau > Quotes

“Many thousands of the survivors did not leave the Allied camps; some not for months, some not for years, some not at all. Thousands died from disease and malnourishment even after Hitler’s defeat.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“One critic put out a mocking notice in a magazine: “Memo to would-be war criminal: If you enjoy mass murder, but also treasure your skin, be a scientist, son. It’s the only way, nowadays, of getting away with murder.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Project Paperclip, the secret program that brought some sixteen hundred German scientists to the United States after the war.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“At Eichmann’s side in the late 1930s, von Bolschwing began to put the building blocks of Jewish persecution in place—first in Germany, then in Austria, then in Romania.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“He was soft-spoken and grandfatherly as he introduced himself. He seemed utterly and completely normal. Nothing about him suggested his dark past. The “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt famously called this odd phenomenon when writing about Eichmann’s trial.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Some nine hundred thousand Jews had died at Treblinka, but to Pat Buchanan, Holocaust revisionist, it was only a deportation point, Sher thought to himself.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“To the alarm of Army officials, nearly seven hundred of the card-carrying Nazi Party members had left Germany for America beginning in the mid-1930s; many of them were allowed into the country even after Hitler and the Nazis had invaded Poland in 1939 and set off World War II.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“For reasons Gus never quite understood, his father had changed his posture and was now willing to admit to both the Justice Department and to Gus that, yes, he had been a Nazi. His father was willing to confirm his membership in the Nazi Party, the SS, and the SD, but nothing more, Gus told Mausner. No details, no explanations, no follow-up questions from Mausner or anyone else”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The deeper he dug into the Nuremberg files, the more convinced Allen became that Dr. Strughold—the noted alumnus of Project Paperclip—was directly connected to Nazi war crimes of the worst variety.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Then there was the remarkable case of Ferenc Koreh, a former Nazi propagandist in New Jersey who had a whole band of FBI agents trying to protect him from deportation.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Even as the United States was casting blame on the Vatican for shepherding Hitler’s minions to freedom, it was doing much the same itself, creating a safe haven for the Nazis in America.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“For both Washington and Moscow, Hitler’s scientists had become the spoils of war.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Many thousands of the survivors did not leave the Allied camps; some not for months, some not for years, some not at all. Thousands died from disease and malnourishment even after Hitler’s defeat. At Dachau, at Bergen-Belsen, and at dozens of DP camps like them, they remained jailed inside the walls that Hitler had erected. With the survivors surrounded by the stench of death and squalor, the liberating Allied forces, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would not allow them to leave. The world didn’t know what to do with them.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“the Truman administration announced that Dr. Schreiber was leaving America. The Air Force swooped him out of Texas—not to West Germany, where he might have faced trial for war crimes, but to safer confines in Argentina.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Prosecution of war criminals is no longer considered of primary importance to U.S. Authorities,” an Army intelligence official wrote in an internal memo.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The resistance did not deter Holtzman. In 1979 Congress ordered the Justice Department to create the Office of Special Investigations within the Criminal Division to handle the Nazi cases, and it authorized more than $2 million for the work.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Pat Buchanan. Buchanan, a former Nixon aide with a rapier tongue and a pugnacious personality, didn’t mask his disdain for what he called the “revenge- obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He believed that the entire Nazi-hunting team should be abolished,”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Jakob Reimer, the SS officer turned potato chip salesman. They sneaked into America as reformed “refugees,”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The official report now declared that Rudolph, rather than being a dangerous, “100% Nazi,” posed no security threat to America and “was not a war criminal, not an ardent Nazi.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“His findings were an indictment of the United States’ refugee effort in the harshest terms he knew. “As matters now stand,” Harrison wrote to Truman after touring the DP camps, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” The Nazis’ victims, the dean found, were being victimized once again—but this time by the Americans”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Rockler called the old man a “wheelchair case”; he could only imagine the sympathy that von Bolschwing, in his condition, would elicit from a judge. A deal would save the years of litigation needed to take away his citizenship. More important, it would avoid the risk of another Soobzokov embarrassment, where von Bolschwing might prove that the CIA knew all about his Nazi history when it helped him into the country.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Some of the cases had stagnated for so long that seventeen men on the list had died while the INS “investigated” them. Holtzman’s tipster was right: the INS really was doing nothing about the Nazis. The congresswoman was determined to change that.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“For Nazis facing deportation, South America was seen as less a punishment than a destination. Sher could almost picture a smiling Linnas relaxing under the palm trees on the beaches of Panama, living out his days as some sort of bon vivant in exile.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Americans knew plenty about the glistening marvels of aviation produced at the camp: the gravity-defying V-2 missiles launched across Europe by Hitler and then imported to America. But they knew virtually nothing about how and where the Nazis had built those missiles, even as books in Europe, like the one in Rosenbaum’s hands, were being written on the place. The anonymity of Dora was no accident. General Patton and the military had eagerly publicized America’s liberation of Dachau and other concentration camps, but they wanted no such publicity surrounding the secrets of Dora, as America claimed the mountain factory’s scientists and its rockets for itself. It was as if the place had never existed.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Again and again, the prosecutors asked Lileikis about his role in rounding up Jews for slaughter, and again and again, he refused to answer, with no hint of regret. The prosecutors could ask him whatever questions they wanted about Vilnius; he wasn’t talking.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“With Hitler’s defeat, the flight of the Nazis to America only accelerated. The true total of fugitives may never be known, but the number of postwar immigrants with clear ties to the Nazis likely surpassed ten thousand, from concentration camp guards and SS officers to top Third Reich policymakers, leaders of Nazi puppet states, and other Third Reich collaborators.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Bishop Trifa embraced his past, almost taunting immigration authorities for more than thirty years to come after him. Politically well-connected, Trifa became the national leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“Buchanan was a natural ally for the Alabama scientists, with his public attacks on the Nazi office filling the opinion pages of newspapers nationwide”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“But by the early 1950s, Allen Dulles at the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and a handful of other senior American intelligence officials had in place around the globe a formidable network of their own of loosely linked and far-flung ex-SS men and Nazi operatives. They were the spy agencies’ foot soldiers in the Cold War.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men

“The CIA had a file on Lileikis because the former Nazi collaborator was one of their own. Like Tom Soobzokov in Paterson, New Jersey; like Otto von Bolschwing in San Jose; like Edgars Laipenieks in San Diego, and like dozens of others with Nazi ties on their resumés, Aleksandras Lileikis, too, had worked for the CIA as a Cold War spy targeting the Soviets.”
― Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men