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Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War

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I have to say that this is a great examination of the inadvertent effects in American policy and ideology following the recruitment of Nazi intelligence officers. This book should be read not only by those interested in the origins of the Cold War, but also by those who want to study Operation Paperclip, the recruitment of Nazi scientists by the American government. This is not revisionist history, and it is not one of those quasi-historical books that try to sell themselves on a controversial and speculative thesis. It is well documented, and a very worthy book for anyone interested in mid-20th century history.

It's a shame that Christopher Simpson's "Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War" has gone out of print. While portions of this book smack of revisionist history, the truth at the heart of it is nothing short of harrowing and infuriating. Most significantly, it's an important part of post-War American history that needs further discussion: the carte blanche treatment given to some of the Nazi party's worst war criminals in exchange for dubious (at best) information on the Russians.

According to Simpson's exhaustive research, brutal mass murderers whose technical and/or espionage value saved them from the Nuremburg trials, were given new lives, lots of money, and immunity in America in order to aid in our fight against the communists. While it seems that some of the information they gave us tilted the Cold War in our favor, the fact remains that these men had the blood of countless concentration camp victims on their hands. The photos of the death camps, including a poignant photograph of four generations of Jewish women in their underwear, moments before their execution, underscores Simpson's outrage at the cheapness America placed on their lives.

Lastly, I would point out that the subtitle is slightly misleading. While Simpson does discuss the effects these informants had on the Cold War, the subtext really has to do with the effects they had on American society. And it's not a pretty picture. I hope this book is brought back in print. Until then, picked up one of the used copies available here.

Very scary stuff. The bottom line is that for the sake of enhancing national security and national competitiveness, the U.S. Government, with approval from the highest levels, funded the wholesale introduction into U.S. citizenship of both Nazi scientists and Nazi participants in genocidal programs who were viewed in many cases as "essential" to our anti-Communist endeavors. The loss of perspective among selected senior intelligence and policy officials, and the long-term influence of this program on our obsession with Communism, give one pause.

Christopher Simpson's Blowback is a scrupulously researched work about how the United States government, contrary to its stated policies, deliberately recruited a veritable army of former Nazis and collaborators in the years immediately after World War II. Acting principally through the CIA, these ex-Nazis and sympathizers were then used in our developing cold war against the former USSR, mostly without success, but always behind a veil of secrecy. And that's the theme of his work: in the name of anti-communism, any new-found allies were OK, and whatever war crimes they had engaged in prior to swearing allegiance to us was ignored or erased.

Simpson carefully documents how US foreign policy personnel, who had clear knowledge that their new spy recruits had committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, ignored or hid their past, supposedly because these former Nazis had intelligence value.

There are many lessons worth learning from this valuable book: how easy and how routine it was for the OSS and its successors to subvert the laws and policies of the United States through deception. Whenever it was time to seek immigrant status for an ex-Nazi whose past would have disqualified him, the OSS or its successors simply doctored the files to delete the offending material. As the participants in these charades candidly acknowledge in his work, they thought they were acting in the country's best interests, and they weren't going to let mere nuisances like US laws stand in their way. All this took place at the very dawn of the Cold War, before the CIA had even been formally established. It's not a stretch to argue that the CIA's continuing mentality that it isn't bound by US law because it knows what's best for the country was born and nurtured by this large-scale deception.

As part of the CIA's anti-communist campaign, it also tried repeatedly to instigate armed insurrections against various communist states in the 1940s and 1950s, none of which were successful. It also funded and supported various assassination campaigns. Here we see a pattern of behavior that the CIA repeated again and again: it funded these operations "off the books," meaning Congress was largely kept in the dark about what the CIA was up to, and the CIA arrogated to itself the right to decide whether these proxy wars and assassination campaigns were proper US policies. And as Simpson notes, by using quislings and collaborators for these campaigns, people known in their communities and nations for their terrible deeds in World War II, the US unwittingly played into Soviet propaganda that the US was really no different than the Nazis themselves.

In addition, as Simpson make very clear, much of what these former Nazis fed the OSS and CIA as information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe turned out to be baseless, and in many cases their spy networks turned out to have been deeply compromised by the USSR. The spy networks consistently overestimated the actual military threat posed by the USSR. But as Simpson points out, these CIA paid assets had ever incentive to overstate the danger. They were on the payroll, and as long as the Soviet menace appeared imminent, they would remain so. But start to say that there was no threat and the gravy train might come to an abrupt halt. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, anyone?

Finally, because they fed the CIA, which admittedly had few Company assets on the ground in Eastern Europe after the war, a steadily hawkish line about the USSR and its intentions, they helped to contribute to the shrill political hysteria that emerged. I don't want to be misunderstood: the Soviet Union was evil, its methods vile and I don't weep any tears for its demise. But in our fear and in our ignorance, we made serious policy errors in those post-war years, and in doing so, we relied to a significant degree on people we should have known better than to trust: a group of ex-Nazis and collaborators who we knew were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further, as I have suggested here, we helped inculcate our national security apparatus with a view that the ends always justified the means, and that as intelligence gatekeepers, the CIA was not bound by US law or public policy, but merely by its own secret determination of what was in the country's best interests.

"Here one sees the extent of the corruption of American ideals that has taken place in the name of fighting communism. No one, it seems, not even Adolf Eichman's personal staff, was too tainted to be rejected by the CIA's recruiters, at least as long as his relationship with the U.S. government could be kept secret.
"The American people deserve better from their government. There is nothing to be gained by permitting U.S. intelligence agencies to continue to conceal the true scope of their association with Nazi criminals in the wake of World War II. The files must be opened; the record must be set right."

This book was published in 1988 and since then the files have been opened and then closed and opened and closed again. The battle goes on.

If you are one of those folks who have dismissed the secreting of Nazis into the U.S after World War II because you thought that they were all "innocent" scientists whose knowledge was crucial to our survival, you have a lot to learn. And you will learn a lot of it in this book.

I picked up this book for a dime at some flea market or yard sale many years ago. I read it but still didn't believe it. Since that time, I have taken up the project of determining "Who Financed Adolf Hitler" and why. This book deals with the "why" in the above question.

I hate to say it but this is a book on the treasonable acts of some top people in the American government and business community.
I have already gone through this book and highlighted the chapters. It is on my list for synopsizing. I do this task because I want to more deeply ingrain the facts of this book into my memory. My attempt is to make books like this one more a part of my readily available accessible knowledge. I want to know what it says and I want to remember what is says. This business is too important to simply file in the back bedroom of my cognizant being. I want to study this, know it and understand it all - if I can. At the moment I am working on the same project with two other books, so this book will have to sit on the shelf for awhile.
I suppose one would classify this as a cold war book. But I considered it a World War II history book. This is the kind of book that will help you to understand why there was a World War II - and a World War I for that matter and a World War III - if it is in the making.

More and more of us Americans must learn this information. We have to know it and understand it so that we can get over it in the future and hopefully never let this type of thinking and attitude lead us back to wars of this nature ever again.
At the moment we seem to be losing this battle.

Richard Edward Noble - The Hobo Philosopher - author of:

"America on Strike" A Survey of Labor Strikes in America.

"Blowback" was published in 1988 and almost all the Nazis and collaborators who were welcomed into the United States by the American government are certainly beyond justice now, although they were pretty safe even before they died. The book is far from a full account but its examples are revolting enough.

It is sometimes argued -- it was about Iraq in 2003-4 -- that in backward countries after the bad old regime is ousted, the "technocrats" involved in the old crimes must be retained, because nobody else can make the railroads run on time. It's a feeble argument, but even that much justification was absent in the recruitment of, eg, Reinhard Gehlen or Werner von Braun. Germany was a swinish country but not technically backward.

No, the justification was twofold: If we didn't get them, the Russians would (true, but that would have been better for us); and that realpolitik required making use of their special knowledge, no matter how obtained.

Simpson demolishes the second justification. The Nazis we recruited were just as vulnerable to KGB penetration after 1945 as before, which is to say, completely.

The moral question was totally opaque to the men who made common cause with German Nazis and their East European and Roman Catholic collaborators in mass crimes. Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA, shrugged it off. One need not invite these men to one's club, need one?

Well, Dulles wouldn't have invited me into his club, either. It would have been better had we let these childish prep school boys serve out their lives playing squash rather than meddling with people's lives.

It was, however, not always a favor we did to the criminals. The ones we dropped behind the Iron Curtain to foment rebellion were rounded up and shot, thanks to Kim Philby's penetration of U.S. Intelligence. (William Sloane Coffin Jr., another preppie, was a hardcore anticommie before he turned peacenik. His memoir, "Once to Every Man," describes how he sent numerous Ukrainian terrorists to their deaths at the hands of the NKVD. It is not cited in Simpson's extensive bibliography but provides the personal, fey touch that is lacking from Simpson's grim relation.)

It is, as Simpson says, probably inevitable that any security apparatus will recruit criminals, given a similar opportunity. Spooks are too stupid to realize that 1) they will be fed swill; 2) they become prisoners of their agents, who can never be discharged or even controlled, lest they reveal the immorality of the apparat (at least, in a civilized society); 3) the agents will be untrustworthy.

This is a good argument against having a security apparatus, or at least against giving it a field operational role. The moan that America did not have agents on the ground in Iraq was misplaced. If we had, the same stupid mistakes would no doubt have been made. The adoption of fools like Chalabi demonstrates the point.

What Simpson wrote in 1988 was just as relevant in 2003: "The information-gathering and intelligence divisions of intelligence agencies are intensely political organizations. Instead of the ideal of dispassionate, accurate evaluation of facts, what one actually encounters inside such groups is a sharply competitive business in which final reports are often shaped as much by the policies of the administration in power as they are by the underlying reality of any given situation. Bureaucratic infighting and even domestic partisan debates play a very substantial role in the creation of intelligence analyses. During the cold war years the CIA and army intelligence often selectively enlisted those persons abroad who confirmed those agencies' vision of what U.S. strategy should be."

I endorse this view, except that "often" should be changed to "always."

The other problem, not addressed by Simpson, is that it is impossible to recruit adults to spy work. Malcolm Muggeridge, who declined an invitation to join the British Secret Service, made this point many years ago. Simpson does not make the point, but every page of his book shows how right Muggeridge was.

Originally, this sin was non-partisan. It was Truman and the Democrats who set up and justified the use of Nazi criminals, but the Republicans took it over and were, in the end, partly taken over by it. Many reputations, like James Burnham's and George Kennan's, are tarnished by Simpson's delving into obscure archives.

The great sin, though, came later. Once the Nazi-Eastern European fascist view colonized the Republican Party, the policy of Eisenhower was "liberationism": The supposedly restive peoples of the Russian empire would be encouraged to revolt and America would support them.

The peoples were restive all right, but America was unwilling to follow through on its bargain. There seems little doubt that the suppression of the revolts that started in East Germany in 1953 (and were aflame in Poland and Ukraine even before the war ended) cowed the captive nations, so that the eventual dissolution of the empire was delayed, not advanced.

Today's rightwingers denounce long decades of Russian tyranny, but when they had a chance to put up or shut up, they shut up.

The American government pursued a policy of frank, though hidden, terrorism from 1945 until, well, until now. It took men of unusual stupidity to devise a program of limited guerrilla war designed to irritate a man like Stalin who was 1) already paranoid; and 2) armed with atom bombs.

As we never learn, it is bad policy to tease a rattlesnake unless you are going to chop off his head.

Everyone who cares about the future of the world needs this book! It's the truth about where the right wing stood during and after World War Two and shows how that whole era of 'America's greatest Generation' gilt is more than slightly tarnished.

This is not a book for those who believe the American Myth: the shining beacon on the hill, liberty and justice for all, where government officials uphold their oath to protect the Constitution. This is a book about the cancer that our government brought into this country at the end of World War 2, when paranoia ruled. Now thoroughly entrenched, these Nazis and their sympathizers have shaped this country in ways our Founders would find tragic and immoral. Along with another book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics, the courageous reader will find many facts from reputable journalists in this award-winning volume. Further afield, an internet search for this term -- nazigop -- will yield even more material.