Customer Reviews

The Belarus Secret

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Amazing book. Everything what I read 25 years ago in the Soviet Union papers about former Nazis working on Radio Liberty, Radio Freedom etc.,turned out to be true... One cannot suspect J.Loftus in pro-Soviet feelings - he just writes about what he found.

As the participants of the WWII era expire at an alarming rate, we have the ability to revisit history with a new perspective, as many of the material that previously contained secrets surface without the concern of penalty. The Belarus Secret, although aged in release (1981), provides a great companion piece to many of the books detailing Operation Paperclip and the like and the failings of 20th century espionage.

To the critics assailing the lack of proper references and quality of sources, you should properly heed the author's preface where he discloses that his conclusions were based on the availability of public documents and subject to the discretion and review of certain "intelligence agencies" that forced the redaction of certain material. Certainly, critics of the author's work would not suggest that the book was based on conjecture if subject to that kind of scrutiny and sanitization, would they?

Controversies aside, Loftus, the author, does a more than adequate job describing the atmosphere from which an extremely flawed, fledgling US intelligence service (along with that of other Allied intelligence) created the schemes that would promote folly and failure of former Nazi colloborators as intelligence assets. Further, the picture becomes clear as the anti-communist ambitions of one man, with little oversight, creates the self-perpetuating mistake of allowing holocaust monsters, US citizenship, while evolving agencies cover up their atrocious lack of good judgment.

While this is a short book, it provides ample context of a region caught in a struggle for a national survival and what some men might do in the name of survival and ego. What is clear is that our own government is manned by merely, men, in all of the meanings that can allude to. We ought never forget that winning at all costs can leave an aftertaste that is very bitter. The Belarus Secret reminds us.

If you can get this cheaply, read it!

The best review I have seen of this book is the following by Professor James Dingley, whose review title I include here, and which originally appeared in 1984.

This book review appears on the Web by permission of both the author and the periodical in which it appeared:

[...]

Source citations are included in the article, as well as contact information for "The Journal of Byelorussian Studies" (which was published between 1965 and 1988; thus the older spelling of "Belarusian").

The last paragraph of the review is a telling summary of the book:

"No-one can seriously maintain that Byelorussians could not possibly be implicated in Nazi war crimes. On the other hand, accusations, particularly when levelled against a whole nation, must be supported by evidence. It is clear that Loftus has not yet learned how to collect that evidence, and has insufficient linguistic and historical knowledge to deal with source material."