The Nazis we saved

I knew that the US secreted Nazis into the states during and after WWII, but this article includes things I didn't know.

And then the more I got into it, and the more horrified I was by the conditions that the survivors lived in — where you had thousands and thousands of people dying even after the liberation, of disease, of malnutrition. I realized it was relevant to the story because as easy as it was for the Nazis to get into America, it was just as horribly difficult for the Jews and the other survivors to get out of the camps.

It took them months, and in some cases a couple of years, to get out of these displaced-person camps.

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Patton believed that the Nazis were best suited to run these camps. In fact, he openly defied orders from then Gen. [Dwight] Eisenhower, who was in charge of the European forces after the war.

Patton was in charge of the displaced persons camps. Patton had sort of an odd fondness almost for the Nazi prisoners, believe it or not. He believed that they [were] the ones in the best position to efficiently run the camps — and he gave them supervisory approval to basically lord over the Jews and the other survivors.

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Of all the [Holocaust] survivors in the camps, only a few thousand came in in [the] first year or so. To get a visa was a precious commodity, and there were immigration policymakers in Washington who were on record saying that they didn't think the Jews should be let in because they were "lazy people" or "entitled people" and they didn't want them in.

But there were many, many thousands of Nazi collaborators who got visas to the United States while the survivors did not — even though they had been, for instance, the head of a Nazi concentration camp, the warden at a camp, or the secret police chief in Lithuania who signed the death warrants for people.

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There are still documents that remain classified today about the CIA's relationship with Nazi figures in the '40s and '50s and into the '60s. A lot of these documents have become declassified just in the last 10 or 15 years. ... There are documents that may open up whole new chapters that still remain classified.

  Eric Lichtblau @ NPR on his book "The Nazis Next Door"